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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

It's not just the try/catch thing. Ruby code can have a syntax error in a conditional that is rarely true, which may crop up in production from time to time. I've seen it happen many times, including in some popular Ruby libraries. A compiled language would have caught that.

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"Ruby code can have a syntax error in a conditional..."

No, it can't. If this is something you've seen "many times", would you mind providing an example? Show me a program that Ruby tries to execute without having been able to parse it.

    if foo.something
      foo.instance_eval "SYNTAX ERROR"
    end

I know any form of eval is sort of cheating...

But perhaps what he meant was not a syntax error, but things like:

    if foo.something
      foo.something_misspelled = bar
    end

Which isn't technically a syntax error, but that code is invalid in a statically typed language.

Did you mean to say "semantic error" instead of "syntax error"?

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