In the following, the first line has a balance of brackets and looks syntactically correct. Would you expect the lexer to add a semicolon? 
  $a = $b + $c
            + $d + $e;
Yes, and the user will get an error. This is similar to previous example with trailing on a new line 

print( "Hello World" )
    if (1);

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The first question is why he/she wants to format the code this way if he/she suffers from "missing semicolons" problem, wants to avoid missing semicolon error and, supposedly deliberately enabled pragma "softsemicolons" for that?

This is the case where the user need to use #\ to inform the scanner about his choice. But you are right in a sense that it creates a new type of errors -- "missing continuation." And that there is no free lunch. This approach requires specific discipline to formatting your code.

In reply to Re^6: What esteemed monks think about changes necessary/desirable in Perl 7 outside of OO staff by likbez
in thread What esteemed monks think about changes necessary/desirable in Perl 7 outside of OO staff by likbez

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