Identifying apparently unused globals

[Simon Forman]

skip at pobox.com wrote:
> At work we have a fairly large application (about 20 packages, 300+ modules)
> that looks like we might be heading into a bit of a plateau stage.  Now
> seems like a good time to identify and delete old, unused code that's flown
> under the radar screen for awhile simply because nobody was looking for it.
> Trouble is, most of that unused code consists of module-level classes,
> functions and variables, so it's hard to distinguish mechanically from code
> that *is* used.  Is there a tool out there that will slurp in a number of
> packages, identify all the global names then remove those that it determines
> are referenced?  (Yes, I know it's impossible to do this in general.  We
> have one very restricted exec statement and no eval() calls, so I'm not too
> worried about that sort of obfuscation.)
>
> Thx,
>
> Skip

I haven't used it myself, but pychecker
(http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/) is supposed to be able to perform
such stunts.  From the page: "Types of problems that can be found
include: Unused globals and locals (module or variable)"

HTH,
~Simon