I thought they were joking, but my co-workers have started using the --i-am-a-dummy command line flag on MySQL's SQL shell. "A useful startup option for beginners is --safe-mode (or --i-am-a-dummy for users that has [sic] at some time done a DELETE FROM table_name but forgot the WHERE clause." It would be interesting if Perl had something similar. Its a different flavor than the usual strict and warnings, which are geared towards more experienced users and in general don't restrict functionality. use warnings qw(beginner); (aka Ima::Dummy) would try to save new users from themselves. Perhaps warning on things like loops going beyond a million iterations. The beginnings of this sort of thing can be seen in the Dunce::Files module and Simon's proposed Safety::First. Just throwing it out into the collective consciousness, haven't thought it through very far yet. -- Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ Perl6 Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One Do you actually think about what you are saying or is it an improvisational game of Mad Libs that you play in your head?
