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Comment by angilly | Hacker News Reader

Can a bug be by design? :)

It's a fairly common phrase (I thought - maybe not) simply meaning: you or I or everyone may not like it, but the developers did it that way on purpose.

In many cases, a bug by design is a question of trade-offs. In this case, stricter rules for the parser might mean more syntax for the programmer.

For this to count as a feature and not, umm, a dodgy implementation of a parser, it would have to convey some advantage... But what?

As far as I can tell the only advantage is the ability to write code such as this:

  if condition
    x = true
  end
  puts "hello" if x

without initializing x to false before the conditional.

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