2. When intentionally writing perl, half the time my "perl -c foo.pl" complains about syntax or badly used names (usu. misspellings), with the typo to correct being obvious. As a practical matter, it's not a problem.

I see a lot of semicolons in that ocr output, which might be cheating.

I'm sure it has some level of checking, but it doesn't seem anywhere near like what you get in Rust or MyPy.

I generally find dumb mistakes and typos take more time to solve than type annotations and verbose syntax take to write.