Well, I had my epiphany in the chatbox, so I might as well share.

If the compiler worked like a spell checker, it could pop up a dialog and say "Detected a syntax error xxx, I think you should change your code to yyy. Shall I change it?"

I spend a lot of my debugging time nailing spelling errors and missing braces. I'd rather the compiler took a guess and asked me if it was right. Pressing 'y' five times would be so much nicer than having to get back into the text editor 5 times. And if I have to press 'n' and fix it by hand, I've lost nothing.

How much different from "Might be a runaway multi-line "" string starting on line N" is that?

Just as a more useful example, why not use Symbol::Approx to guess what function I misspelled, and then suggest the correction to me?

Or how about 'Detected missing semicolon at line 33, shall I correct?' Why is it a good use of my time to correct this trivial problem by hand?

Or how about "Unmatched left brace at line 133, but if I pop a brace in front of the next 'sub xxx', I can compile. Want me to fix it?"