[indspenceable]

That's orthogonal to the point, though - when I write ruby, I don't care about how it will get parsed, I care about how it will run.

[npc]

This is sort of an odd statement since the way a piece of code is run is directly related to how it is parsed. If an alternative implementation like Topaz parses something differently than MRI then you'll have code that does two different things on two different interpreters. Having a complicated and informally specified grammar makes this a lot harder to avoid.