Without compilation, how to find bugs?

[BartC]

On 14/10/2016 01:59, sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, October 13, 2016 at 4:06:36 PM UTC-7, pozz wrote:

>> Are the things exactly how I understood, or do I miss something in Python?
>
> As others have said, user a linter.

With Python you're supposed to just be able run any source code 
instantly; how will using a 'lint' tool impact that process? Or is it 
only meant to be used infrequently?

> 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.

How can that work? I thought one of the biggest deals with Python is 
that you can re-bind function names to anything else. So:

if cond:
     func2 = 38
else:
     func2 = func1

Then func2(1) can either be perfectly correct, or completely erroneous!

(I have my own suspicions that functions in Python are predominantly 
used in a boring, predictable, static manner (so allowing certain 
optimisations - or error checking), but I got the impression from some 
threads here that many apparently do little else in their code but bind 
and rebind function names.)

-- 
Bartc