I just recently discovered a very useful package for anyone who writes python code:
pylint. It took a little tweaking to get it to do what I wanted. Besides looking for outright errors, it checks all the recommended Python coding style conventions. Since I don't abide by many of those, pylint gave my
nodepy code a rating of -4.5/10.0 (yes, that's a NEGATIVE rating) initially. More importantly, I couldn't find the real errors among the thousands of style complaints. To run pylint without checking all the style conventions, just type
pylint -d C xxxxwhere "xxxx" is the name of a python package or module. It will still make a lot of subjective judgments about your code (like suggesting that no function should have more than 5 arguments), but to me it's a tolerable level (and sometimes the suggestions really are helpful). More information about pylint's output messages can be found here:
http://www.logilab.org/card/pylintfeatures. I was able to uncover several previously unnoticed issues in my package in this way.
