Comment by ubertaco

> Another example is the sequencing syntax <expr> ; <expr> and productions with <expr> as the right-most symbol:

    let test1 b =
      if b then
        print_string "1"
      else
        print_string "2"; print_string "3"

> Here print_string "3" is not a part of the if expression, so this function always prints “3”.

Well, yeah. Here's the equivalent Java code:

    void test1(bool b) {
        if (b) print_string("1");
        else print_string("2");
        print_string("3");
    }

You've chosen to use a single-statement "else" form _without_ "bracketing" it with `begin` and `end`:

    let test1 b =
        if b then
            print_string "1"
        else begin
            print_string "2";
            print_string "3"
        end

...which is equivalent to this Java code, where you _also_ would have to "bracket" the else-block:

    void test1(bool b) {
        if (b) print_string("1");
        else {
            print_string("2");
            print_string("3");
        }
    }

You could argue that Java (and C, and C++, and Javascript, and...) has the same "ambiguous parsing problem", then -- except that it doesn't, and the author is just thrown off by `begin`/`end` as block delimiters instead of curly braces, which might be a sign that they've also never seen Ruby before, or Elixir, or Pascal, or....