Without compilation, how to find bugs?

[sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com]

On Thursday, October 13, 2016 at 4:06:36 PM UTC-7, pozz wrote:
> I come from the C language, that is a compiled and strongly typed 
> language.  I learned many good tricks to write good code in C: choose a 
> coding style, turn on as many warnings as possible, explicitly declare 
> static variables and functions (when needed), explicitly declare const 
> variables (if the piece of code will not change them), explicitly 
> declare all the functions, and so on.
> 
> All the tricks have a common goal: to discover bugs as soon as possible, 
> mostly during compilation process. Indeed I usually find some bugs 
> during compilation (or static analysis). It seems to me very important.
> 
> Now I'm learning Python and it appears to me very simple, but at the 
> same time highly dangerous. For example, I can write a function that 
> accepts two arguments and call it with only one argument. I can execute 
> the script without any problem and I will not notice the bug until I 
> test exactly the erroneous line of code (the call with only one argument).
> 
> However, I think the language interpreter could emit the error before 
> launching the script even without executing the wrong instruction, 
> because it perfectly knows how many arguments the function wants and 
> that one instruction calls it with a wrong number of arguments.
> 
> Are the things exactly how I understood, or do I miss something in Python?

As others have said, user a linter.

I'd go a step further and use an actual code editor or IDE that includes some basic static analysis.  Using this example that Skip used:

def func2(a, b): 
    print(a, b) 

def func1(a): 
    print(a) 

func2(1)

Any code editor worth using will highlight the ) on the last line and tell you that there's a missing parameter.