Does python hate cathy?

[castironpi at gmail.com]

On Mar 23, 8:05 pm, Tim Chase <python.l... at tim.thechases.com> wrote:
> > When I run this script, I got the following exception:
> > Exception exceptions.AttributeError: "'NoneType' object has no
> > attribute 'population'" in <bound method Person.__del__ of
> > <__main__.Person instance at 0xb7d8ac6c>> ignored
>
> > To to newcomer like me, this message doesn't make much sense. What
> > seems weird to me is that, if I change the variable cathy to something
> > else, like cath, or even cat, then the script will finish gracefully.
> > Why "cathy" is not liked?!!
>
> > My python is of version 2.5.1, on Ubuntu.
>
> When I first read this, I thought you were crazy.  I ran the
> code, and you're not.  I tried under versions 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5
> on my Debian box, and got the same results.  Neither "cathy" nor
> "ca" works,  but "c", "cat", "cath", "cath_y" and "cathy_" all
> work just fine.
>
> Even more infuriating is that if I try and use pdb to debug,
> Swaroop drops into pdb, but Abdul and Cathy both error out.
> [snip]

> Does Python hate Cathy?

Does Pothon?