Improving Compiler Error Messages

[Walter Bright]

bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
> 
>> This is characterized as "smart" parsing, but I have a less kind 
>> word for it - "hack"
> 
> That feature is handy, computer languages are designed for humans first.
> Python is now almost twenty years old (appeared in 	1991) and in the meantime that feature has not caused disasters :-)

The problems may or may not be obvious to the user, but they can show up in 
buggy third party tools, and fewer third party tools, that must parse the source 
code, such as refactorers, IDEs, pretty printers, source code analyzers, etc.