Iterating over characters in a string is something that's done very often in introductory CS classes, but very little in the real world. Python has support for

Iterating over characters in a string is something that's done very often in introductory CS classes, but very little in the real world. Python has support for string finding and regexes; why in the world would I be individually iterating over characters? Generally, when you see that, it's a code smell. So yeah, I totally agree with you, it'd be better if trying to iterate over a string were a flat-out error, and if you really want it, you should mean it. Though Python being dynamic still means that you'll only spot this error at runtime. As for linters, how do they know if your intent was to reassign the value of an existing variable, or to define a new one? The language has no way to indicate which of these is intended.