But the bar is a valid binary selector which takes a text parameter

| text

�� | text '|' expected ->

�� := self requestPassword

You seem to suggest that the parser should use formatting, presence/absence or spaces/newlines, but it never did so, it just skips/ignores spaces.
The parser process as much as possible until the first error. It never did a global analysis to find the minimal error. That's a far more difficult problem.

Note that for the same kind of reason, while we could make ^ a binary selector as I proposed once, we didn't yet by fear of interpreting things differently in case of missing period:

�� self seeThePeriodMissingAtEndOfThisSentence

�� ^self

2016-08-13 0:02 GMT+02:00 Dale Henrichs <dale.henrichs@gemtalksystems.com>:

On 08/12/2016 11:40 AM, Nicolai Hess wrote:

2016-08-12 20:30 GMT+02:00 Dale Henrichs <dale.henrichs@gemtalksystems.com>:

`'|' expected` is�� not the error message I would expect when the message pattern is missing from a method and I try to accept in browser:

�� | text |
�� text�� '|' expected ->:= self requestPassword
�� ifTrue: [ UIManager default requestPassword: self prompt ]
�� ifFalse: [ UIManager default request: self prompt initialAnswer: self template ].
�� ^ (text isNil or: [ text isEmpty ])
�� ifTrue: [ nil ]
�� ifFalse: [ text ]

The highlighter was also confused turning red at the `->` instead at the very beginning of the method ...

yeah, this is a funny one.

I onced debugged the parser to find out why that's happening. Can you spot why this is a valid method :

| text |
| ^ text

:)

I cheated and used the syntax highlighting to give me subtle but import clues :)�� Things I missed when initially trying to figure out what I had done wrong ... perhaps an error message that special cases this would be called for: "'|' expected or missing message message pattern" ... There are at least two developers who expected the syntax highlighter to do a better job ... and I sent this thinking about newbies running into what I assume would be a common mistake ...

Dale