[ronaldx]

I re-read the article and I concluded that we are both right. I direct you to the following statement:

"The principles are rarely orthogonal and frequently conflict."

Producing genuinely useful error messages at all requires a complex parser, IMHO. It's not computationally obvious to look at a line of code and say 'actually you just missed this one character'. Requiring a terminating character gives you at least a sanity check starting point to work with - it alone will catch whole categories of errors.