[0x0dea]

"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.

[TheDong]

    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.