Improving Compiler Error Messages

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Ary Borenszweig" <ary at esperanto.org.ar> wrote in message 
news:hrn1bo$hds$1 at digitalmars.com...
> div0 wrote:
>>
>> This is why I really hate programming in Python, it really annoys me not
>> being about to lay my code out my way. As far as I'm concerned the
>> inventor of Python should be beaten to death with a sock full of tab
>> keys. Making white space significant is the most heinously evil decision
>> I've ever come across.
>
> You should try Ruby, it doesn't care about tab characters and correct 
> indentation.

This sort of goes back to some of the talk in other branches of this thread 
about compilers allowing things to be optional when it can infer them:

There's a webapp project I'm working on for a client that involves a number 
of different Haxe/PHP and Haxe/Flash apps, and a bunch of misc command-line 
tools. I dislike a number of things about Python, and I *hate* makefiles, so 
I used Ruby Rake to handle the build process. I definitely like the freeform 
whitespace (for the same reasons Ary mentioned). But Ruby allows a lot of 
syntax to be omitted in certain cases (more than just semicolons), and 
standard Ruby (and particularly Rake) style seem to take heavy advantage of 
that leniency. The result is, I find the lack of that explicit syntax makes 
it incredibly difficult to visually parse the code properly and be confident 
about what exactly my code says. Which, in turn, makes it that much harder 
to really learn the language, especially by looking at examples.