if <assignment>:

[maney at pobox.com]

Delaney, Timothy <tdelaney at avaya.com> wrote:
> Actually, there have been extensive studies (none of which I can quote right
> now ;) which have determined that the most common causes of errors in C/C++
> programs are simple typos

My own experience agrees with this 100% up to this point, except that
it seems not at all to be limited to C/C++.

> which are allowed by the syntax, but change the semantics of the
> program.

That part, however, does not match my own experience.  After the typos
that the compiler catches have been fixed, the "real" errors don't
include a very large percentage of =/== confusion.

> The most common of these are = vs ==, and just about anything to do with
> pointer dereferencing.

Nope, this is definitely coming from another universe.  :-/  Simple
typos that confuse pointer dereferencing?  The only thing that's coming
to mind is a bouncy '*' key, and that would result in a compile-time
error rather often.

Not, of course, that I'm not perfectly happy with not needing a lot of
this baggage for Python!