On the side issue: While the example given, which uses the py_compile.compile defaults via the command line interface, is useless, I disagree that writing a .pyc file for a file without .py is a bug.

Python will run python code with any filename as main module (and not write .pyc).  It will only import the *same code* (and normally write .pyc) if the filename ends with .py (or .pyw on windows).  However, 'import script' will import script.pyc (on the search path) without a script.py file existing.  Using py_compile.compile('script', 'script.pyc') makes that possible.  (I just tried it.)

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