I'm not sure what your point is about Python 1.4. Maybe it's that you're past the point where these things trip you up. However, there are plenty of cases whe

I'm not sure what your point is about Python 1.4. Maybe it's that you're past the point where these things trip you up. However, there are plenty of cases where Python won't give an error message too. Make a typo somewhere in the middle of your function, and it'll quietly introduce a new variable instead of letting you know. A rarely used branch of an if-statement could hide this indefinitely. This could also be avoided (or at least mitigated) by requiring variables to be declared explicitly.