Unconditional compilation?

[Robert Fraser]

John C wrote:
> I'm wondering what the point is in having a version block's syntax 
> checked when the code it contains isn't compiled.

Unambiguous parsing. One of the main goals of the D language AFAIK is to 
make  the syntactic analysis independent of the semantic analysis (one 
of the things that makes C++ so hard to compile). Thus, the syntax tree 
for the code must be able to built without knowing which version 
identifiers are active.