[erlang-questions] Newbie question about line endings

[August Schwartzwald]

Hi,

I started to learn Erlang about a month ago. I really like it and think  
that with some more practice it will become a both unique and powerful  
tool in my growing box of programming languages. However, there is one  
thing about it that I find extremely annoying: The line endings.
I currently know 5 programing languages, they have either 0 (python) or 1  
way to end lines (usually the ';' character). Erlang totally stands out  
here and requires that lines are ended in one of 4 different ways.

Did some googling without finding any good reason to why the language  
works in this way. Can anyone here explain this?

Thanks