Neal just posted that PyChecker deals with it, which is great, but I don't think that PyChecker is enough - until PyChecker is part of the standard distribution and integrated with e.g. the interactive shell, I think that PyChecker is not likely to be used by novices. And we're talking about novices here, right?
Yeah, but I think we should only complain about comparisons to bool that use the literals (as opposed to "if x == y" where either x or y happens to be a bool). A run-time warning can't really do that.
Come to think of it, getting PyChecker integrated w/ the interactive shell would be great! Hard, I suspect, but great!
Certainly better than running tabnanny. :-) I'm not even sure how hard it would be to add this to IDLE -- pychecker is already a module. Maybe Neal will enjoy this challenge? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)