Question

Usually declaring variables on assignment is considered a best practice in VBScript or JavaScript , for example, although it is allowed.

Why does Python force you to create the variable only when you use it? Since Python is case sensitive can’t it cause bugs because you misspelled a variable’s name?

How would you avoid such a situation?

Answer 1

In python it helps to think of declaring variables as binding values to names.

Try not to misspell them, or you will have new ones (assuming you are talking about assignment statements – referencing them will cause an exception).

If you are talking about instance variables, you won’t be able to use them afterwards.

For example, if you had a class myclass and in its __init__ method wrote self.myvar = 0, then trying to reference self.myvare will cause an error, rather than give you a default value.