Thanks for the informative reply!
Makes sense that more people thought about this already.
And I do understand your reasoning regarding how the resources towards developing LAMMPS should be used.
And yes, there is no doubt that developing and checking the validity of the choices regarding the physics of the model are a lot more important than untimely syntax errors, particularly because such types of errors might not come with an error statement or warning.
I did test the timer timeout 0:00:00 every 1 command. It seems to work effectively for the situations I have tested it. Of course, it will not capture all potential errors if there are if statements or jump statements in the script, as you mentioned. But for most scripts it will probably work fine. At least I have started to include it at the beginning when I want to check for potential syntax errors in my scripts. Thanks again!