that was my favourite bit in the entire post - the one place where zig has unambiguously one-upped other languages. the problems it is solving are:

1. from the user's point of view, you can now have multiline string literals that are properly indented based on their surrounding source code, without the leading spaces being treated as part of the string

2. from an implementation point of view having them parsed as individual lines is very elegant, it makes newline characters in the code unambiguous and context independent. they always break up tokens in the code, regardless of whether they are in a string literal or not.