Except in the case of the 'exit' clearly this is accepting and parsing imprecise input in order to guide the user. If the code wasn't looking for 'exit' in order to correct the user (to use 'exit()'), it would just spit out some other error for 'I don't know what you're talking about'. Instead, they actually detect the intent by specifically coding for it... and then ignore it anyway. That's bloody minded.
Except they didn't -- the result of a statement is turned into a string, and the string is printed. There are standard ways of turning objects into strings, and the `__repr__` function on the `exit` object returns that string. If you call that object then it raises an exception that triggers a REPL to cleanly quit.
I'm fairly sure that having any object's `__repr__` throw an exception and exit would lead to even more confusion. Especially if it exits cleanly.
The object shouldn't be in scope anywhere other than the REPL, but that doesn't mean that something, somewhere, isn't stringifying everything because $REASONS and changing the behaviour won't cause an obscure "crash" somewhere unexpected and hard to debug.
How do you feel about java/c++ compiler that give hints like "missing semicolon"? Clearly it knows what's wrong. Why not automagically fix that for you[1]?
JavaScript automatic semicolon insertion does a great job most of the time, but still leads to bafflement when code like
const b = 1
[1, 2, 3].forEach(console.log)
(from your linked page) does the wrong thing, because both forms (with and without a semicolon) are syntactically valid. I would much rather just always use semicolons (or, like Python, never use them) than have to memorise the 5% of oddball cases where I need to add them manually to resolve ambiguity.
We have AI now that can write the entire code for you. Surely it's not much to ask that a compiler, as it parses your code and likely already has high confidence you need a semicolon in a certain spot, can just correct it for you and move on. Maybe have a --fix-errors option to the compiler command line or something.
