Forgetting "()" when calling methods

[A. Lloyd Flanagan]

Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote in message news:<roy-D5BE38.18462125042003 at reader1.panix.com>...
> Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:
> > One thing that PyChecker, at least, is more likely to catch is "code has
> > no effect" statements like
> > 
> > 	sys.exit
> > 
> > Without the parentheses, this clearly can't do anything useful
> 
> In a language as dynamic as Python, you have to be really careful with 
> words like "clearly".
> 
> Invoking the name of an object to see if you raise a NameError could be 
> useful in some situations.  Within the past week or so, there was a 
> serious discussion on this group where code along the lines of:
> 
>    try:
>       True
>    except NameError:
>       do stuff
> 
> was suggested as a way to tell if the version of Python being run had 
> boolean support.

Just an FYI:  pychecker does indeed flag code like that as having 'no
effect', including the boolean test.  Very useful if you call a
function as a statement and forget the parentheses, easy to ignore if
you meant to do it.