The simplest parser style is assembly code: one line, at most one statement. But there's always some desire to get a little more code density than assembly, it'

The simplest parser style is assembly code: one line, at most one statement. But there's always some desire to get a little more code density than assembly, it's just a matter of how one wants to go about the problem. The syntax of older-style BASIC, for example, hews close to the assembly parsing model, just adding a few special cases for different keywords. Algol syntax has a tradition of design based around algorithm description first, with generalized power second. The Forth or Lisp approaches, because they are very generic and powerful, naturally pull those languages in the direction of extensive metaprogramming. In that sense one can see that the more sugary syntaxes treat the programmer more like an end-user, because they direct the workflow. Generalized ones encourage a DIY approach to everything. There are tradeoffs to each strategy.