What I'm saying is that if "else" and "elseif" were both in the grammar (and "elsif" didn't exist), you could have typed "else if" when you meant to type "elseif" and vice-versa and the mistake could easily be overlooked as your code would be syntactically correct, parsing and running and doing the wrong thing.

Now, in Ruby, if you type "elseif" your code will not run. Problem avoided.

The point of Ruby's "elsif" and Python's "elif" is to have visually disparate representations of the two kinds of code blocks (that have different control flows!) that a developer could easily overlook.

The difference is there to help out you and every other developer that use languages that don't use a visible token to separate code blocks, I promise.

"you could have typed "else if" when you meant to type "elseif" and vice-versa and the mistake could easily be overlooked as your code would be syntactically correct, parsing and running and doing the wrong thing."

can you give an example where this would make a difference?