Re: Ambiguous syntax

[Sven Olsen <sven2718@...>]

An error based on ambiguous syntax with valid uses for either form is
also a Bad Idea -- it means that BOTH use cases get hard-flagged as an
error, which just makes for annoyance.

This is where I strongly disagree.  The error in 5.1 was a good annoyance.  It did come up, but only rarely, and removing the error was always easy -- just a question of changing your formatting or dropping in a semicolon.  In 5.2 I started catching the same little errors of intent during runtime debugging -- meaning that they'd take minutes, rather than seconds, to identify and fix.  

Most Lua programmers are still used to 5.1's error check, so the annoyances created by a restricted version of the old check should be minimal.  But I think you could save a lot of needless runtime debugging by adding such a check back into the language.

-Sven