I already mentioned sweet-expressions in another comment. And also, there's one important thing we're forgetting when discussing syntaxes, which is the fact tha

I already mentioned sweet-expressions in another comment. And also, there's one important thing we're forgetting when discussing syntaxes, which is the fact that we very rarely read the code without syntax highlighting, so the examples you posted actually look like this: http://pygments.org/demo/3781004/ http://pygments.org/demo/3781004/ This does change the situation somewhat.