[asdasf]

>Walter is saying you can't have good error messages without semicolons

That is what he said though. I understand it is one example for a larger point, but it is an example that doesn't support that point at all. It is pretty hard to judge the overall point when the example is nonsense.

[ronaldx]

I think you're really missing the point.

Your goal is to write a whole programming language.

Calculating where each statement starts and ends in order to serve a good error message is misdirected effort. Just use a terminating character, and use the standard one: a semi-colon.

[repsilat]

> Just use a terminating character, and use the standard one: a semi-colon.

Significant whitespace is popular as well. You can argue all day about it, but at the moment I think making a language "look like python" is the safer bet for a new language.

[breuleux]

You could also say that newlines always terminate statements unless a continuation character is used. That's a trivial policy that works very well in practice.

[Sssnake]

I don't know how you think that was the point. He doesn't say anything like that. In fact he takes the exact opposite position when dealing with parsing, saying to just write more code. Why would something which literally requires no extra effort (producing useful error messages without semicolons) be misdirected effort, while writing a more complex parser is cool?