What is this error?

[Cirdan]

This seemingly harmless and rather insignificant code snippet:

[anyone, "tavernkeeper_give_tournament_info", [(neg|eq, "$tournament_town", 0),
                                                                    (assign, reg7, "$tournament_town"),
                                                                    (assign, reg8, "$tournament_fee"),
                                                                    (assign, reg9, "$days_till_tournament"),
                                                                    ],
          "The Lord and Lady of {reg7} have invited all knights of noble birth to demonstrate their prowess to them,\
            {reg9} days from now. The knights will be expected to wage {reg8} pounds on their success.",
          "tavernkeeper_pretalk",[]]

Has led me to this failed assertion:

I can stop the error by changing the formatting to this:
[anyone, "tavernkeeper_give_tournament_info", [(neg|eq, "$tournament_town", 0),
                                                                              (assign, reg7, "$tournament_town"),
                                                                              (assign, reg8, "$tournament_fee"),
                                                                              (assign, reg9, "$days_till_tournament"),
                                                                            ],
"The Lord and Lady of {reg7} have invited all knights of noble birth to demonstrate their prowess to them,\
{reg9} days from now. The knights will be expected to wage {reg8} pounds on their success.", "tavernkeeper_pretalk",[]],



However, I still have no idea whatsoever as to the reason why such a minor difference in formatting would lead to an error when starting the game, while Module System's compiler seems unaffected. Would someone please explain this to me?

 

[Dindi]

perhaps it thinks the space between the ", and "tav on the first one is a large group of characters which is exceding some limit.