I prefer Ruby's approach, which is not whitespace-sensitive, but has a very liberal approach to where expressions end. The general rule is, as with Python and

I prefer Ruby's approach, which is not whitespace-sensitive, but has a very liberal approach to where expressions end. The general rule is, as with Python and Go, that open braces, brackets, parens or quotes have precedence; and operators or punctuation at the end of a line will continue to the next line. In addition, there are some complicated parsing internals -- not just for expression-ending sensing, but also for supporting parens-less method calls -- that endow the parser with some compiler knowledge about what tokens are variables and what tokens are methods. In other words, the parser has information that violates the parser/compiler separation of concerns, but it works really well in practice. The only time I ever use \ in Ruby is for string literals that need to be broken up for readability: my_string = "This is a very long string that" \ " must be wrapped." You can use + or <<, but this will be evaluated at runtime, whereas \ results in a single string allocation. Of course, Ruby requires "end" for a lot of constructs, but it could have just as well have used braces.