Without compilation, how to find bugs?
sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com
sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 13 20:59:01 EDT 2016
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.
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