Style checking in python

Posted by Cheng Soon Ong on June 5, 2008

Python is an interpreted language, and hence there are some bugs which only get caught at run time. I recently had a discussion about how irritating it is that programs crash due to errors which can easily be caught at "compile time". My view is that compilation is something that should be transparent to the programmer, and one should still be able to catch all these silly errors while coding. Of course, there is already lots of work in programming languages for this. Paradoxically, most of the concepts were developed for compiled languages.

From wikipedia:

"In computer programming, lint was the name originally given to a particular program that flagged suspicious and non-portable constructs (likely to be bugs) in C language source code. The term is now applied generically to tools that flag suspicious usage in software written in any computer language. The term lint-like behavior is sometimes applied to the process of flagging suspicious language usage. lint-like tools generally perform static analysis of source code."

For python, I found three projects which seemed well supported:

• pychecker
• pylint
• pyflakes

Does anyone know of other style checkers? Are there any user experiences out there?