I don't know you from Adam. Obviously none of my comments can be about you personally because I don't know you. You are not the cause of my opinion. My opinion must be (and is) based on bad experiences with other people. There is nothing that you can do about that except understand how and why some people will react. And then make sure that people who know you personally have cause to understand that you're ethical.

It is not your fault that you're a member of a group (ie students) which is notorious for cheating. And is also notorious for not understanding where the boundary is between receiving legitimate help and plagiarism. I was once a member of the same group. Most people here either were or still are.

However when I was a student, it was a large source of frustration for me that people around me would try to get ahead by cheating rather than really learning. Now that I'm out of school it is frustrating for me to deal with people who're cheating. I've had people submit my work as theirs. I've had to deal with people who are begging all and sundry for the next answer. And the dishonesty doesn't end at school. I still have to deal with things like the fact that resumes can't be trusted because people "exaggerate slightly". (And have to deal with the fact that mine looks worse by comparison because I don't.)

So, without knowing you, I'm going to be inclined to a very uncharitable response to anyone asking for help on passing their course. Maybe you're on the level. Maybe you think that you're on the level, but don't understand the boundary between legitimate assistance and cheating like I'd prefer. Maybe you're trying to generate sympathy so that you can more effectively milk people for answers. I don't know. I have no way of knowing. And I've been burned before.

You sound sincere. But you're not the first person that I've seen ask for help who sounds sincere. And from my previous bad experiences, I'm painfully aware that people who are unashamed about cheating are often the most sincere-sounding - they have no guilt to hold them back. In person I'd have all sorts of body language cues to work off of. But as you'll note, this is not in person. I lack cues. I have no way to tell.

Now that you've been shown my perspective, hopefully you can re-read the whole thread and take it less personally this time.

OK Tilly maybe I can see your perspective a little (based on your past experiences) but I would also like for you to see it from mine, This is a new language for me and I don,t know any seasoned perl programmers (aside from my lecturer) that I could ask for advice (and I see him only on saturday afternoons) or explain something I don't understand. How would you define legitimate assistance Tilly?

My definition of legitimate assistance would be assistance that helps you understand, which doesn't in any way contribute to the work that you'll later submit as your own.

Some trivial examples of clearly legitimate assistance: Advice on study strategies (which I already gave you), pointing you at http://www.perldoc.com/online documentation (personally I prefer using the perldoc command to get the version that matches my version of Perl), answering conceptual questions that you have, and assisting you after the fact in understanding why you got the grade that you got.

Of course giving you that kind of assistance generally requires that you have done enough work up front to identify how you need to be helped. Which serves many good purposes. First of all if you take that energy you'll often manage to work out the answer and won't need assistance. Secondly if you do need assistance, you're now primed to internalize good advice and so get more value from effort spent. Thirdly your up front work gives you more focussed questions, allowing others to give answers that are more likely to address where you actually are.

A trivial example of assistance that I'd consider illegitimate would be someone else debugging the code that you'll submit. (Note that this is pretty much what you actually were asking for.) Figuring out what to do when things go wrong is a large part of the effort that programming takes. In fact debugging is so much of a time sink that good programmers direct most of their energy towards doing things that will simplify later debugging. That includes design activities, incremental development, writing test suites up front, inserting appropriate error checks, and so on. In fact good programmers spend a smaller fraction of their time actually programming than bad programmers do yet finish faster!

I wouldn't expect you (or anyone) to do all of that on a first programming exercise. But learning to be careful is part of the skill. Being able to track down your own syntax errors is like knowing how to dribble in basketball - theoretically you can play the game without that skill, but so poorly that you might as well not bother. And once you have an experiential foundation for knowing why care matters, you're primed to learn more advanced lessons in how to avoid those problems in the first place.