Automatic debugging of copy by reference errors?

[Gabriel Genellina]

On 9 dic, 09:08, "Niels L Ellegaard" <niels.ellega... at gmail.com> wrote:

> Now some of my fortran-using friends would like to use python to
> analyze their data files. I wanted them to avoid making the same
> mistakes as I did so I thought it would be good if they could get some
> nanny-like warnings saying: "Watch out young man. If do this, then
> python will behave differently from fortran and matlab". That could
> teach them to do things the right way.

Best bet is to learn to use python the right way. It's not so hard...

> I am not an expert on all this, but I guessed that it would be possible
> to make a set of constraints that could catch a fair deal of simple
> errors such as the one above, but still allow for quite a bit of
> programming.

The problem is, it's an error only becasuse it's not the *intent* of
the programmer - but it's legal Python code, and useful. It's hard for
the computer to guess the intent of the programmer -yet!...-

-- 
Gabriel Genellina