Musings on --i-am-a-dummy

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?