[Tutor] Pychecker

[Mike Hansen]

I had a frustrating time yesterday with a small Python program I wrote. I wasn't 
getting the results I expected, so I sprinkled print statements through it. I 
wasn't getting anywhere. I tossed it into Komodo to see if the background syntax 
checker would pick up something I was missing. I then stepped through it and 
finally noticed that I had messed up a variable name.

firstlist = [listItem[:12] for listItem in firstList]
     ^
when I meant
firstList = [listItem[:12] for listItem in firstList]
     ^
doh!
Later, I realized that I should have run it through Pychecker which would have 
picked it up immediately.

With that experience of learning the hard way, I'd recommend that you always run 
your code through Pychecker just after editing it and before running it.

In Perl, you can perl -c somehardtoreadperlprogram.pl that will just check the 
syntax. The above problem would have been caught in Perl since I always use 
strict. Is there a command line option in Python to do a Pychecker-like syntax 
check? I see a -t to check the tabs, but nothing to tell it to check the syntax 
but don't run it. If not, should Pychecker be part of the standard distribution? 
Am I missing something?

Mike
Go ahead and reply to me AND the list since I just get the digest.
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