Without compilation, how to find bugs?

[Skip Montanaro]

One other thing. The OP mentioned coming from C. If you are old enough, you
will remember that many errors caught by gcc and other modern compilers
used to be detected by external checkers like lint. Most Makefiles had
"lint" targets in them.

So although you might associate all sorts of error detection and reporting
with the compiler, there is no particular reason it must be there.

Skip