[upwardbound]

Very impressive! I have a question and I was wondering if you have any thoughts. In Artemis as well as in Jupyter and in 3D-oriented tools like Unity, it's common to see this pattern for defining inputs:

In the code: x = 3 Elsewhere in the GUI: (User sets x to 5)

I understand that this pattern has become popular but to me it always struck me as dangerous. It's scary that in the code I can't trust that x = 3 really means x = 3. Especially if I'm skimming the code quickly and not paying attention to the surrounding comments, I might make incorrect assumptions about flow control (if the value is a bool), or other dangerous incorrect assumptions about what the code is doing.

Do you have any ideas for a safer pattern that could be used instead? Maybe something like one of these?

    x = 3 # !INPUT

    x = GUIINPUT() # !DEFAULT=3

    x = GUIINPUT(3)   or equivalently   x = GUIINPUT(default=3)

If you use the third option, GUIINPUT could be defined at the top of the file as something like this:

    def GUIINPUT(default):
      # pseudocode:
      if interpreter == "artemis":
        return artemis_magic(default)
      else:
        sys.stderr.write(f"Warning: Assumed input is {default}; this may not be correct, especially if you the user were not the author of the script!")
        return default