[Python-Dev] PyChecker in Python

[Neal Norwitz]

Title changed.

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> >   Sometimes I wish pychecker was integrated with the distro... But I'm
> > sure there are good reasons for avoiding this.
> 
> Mostly that the PyChecker development cycle is several orders of
> magnitude faster than Python's, so at best you would have an
> out-of-date version of PyChecker in the distro.  Once PyChecker slows
> down a bit, I'd be happy to incorporate it.

Pychecker development has slowed down a bit, but there are 
some other reasons to not include it just yet.

There's several issues that are slowly converging.
The new compiler which Jeremy did a bunch of work on
is an important part.  Ideally, pychecker would be implemented
on top of the new compiler.  This will make integration of pychecker
easier and should also allow it to work with jython.  There's
also been work on using ASTs for pychecker, rather than byte codes.
These are 2 important parts which are on-going.

I've thought about returning to the compiler, but I'm also
keen to clean up a lot of cruft.  I think that's more important.

Generally, I'd like to finish cleaning up the deprecation issues, which
include:  using PendingDeprecations, Py_DEPRECATED in C headers,
and fixing the docs.  I'm still thinking about optimizations
too (remove SET_LINENO and others).  And finally, the compiler
and pychecker.  (Also, generally improving test coverage is 
hrown in somewhere.)

I'm hopeful that 2.4 may be a good time to get the compiler
and pychecker into Python.  But I suspect that pychecker will 
still be maintained separately for a while.

Neal