Why Python is like C++

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.4486.1387663424.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

> On 12/21/2013 10:10 AM, Roy Smith wrote:
> 
> > On the last large C++ project I worked on, we decided (i.e. obeyed a
> > corporate mandate) to start using Coverity's static analysis tool on our
> > 15 year old codebase.  I learned a few things about static analysis then.
> 
> CPython was about that old when Coverity started giving us reports on 
> the C part of CPython (about 400000 loc). CPython is now essentially 
> free of errors detected by Coverity.

How many of those errors were real, and how many were "I suppose, 
technically, this isn't quite correct but in real life, it's just never 
going to be an issue?"  I'm not being cynical here; I'm interested to 
know if it really helped.

> > 2) If your code does tricky things, you can fool the static analyzer,
> > leading to false positives.
> 
> One can define code patterns that are false positives, to silence such 
> reports.

Yes, we did some of those.