A less drastic change that would achieve the same purpose would be to require braces in selection and iteration statements, and to add an "elseif" or "elsif" ke

A less drastic change that would achieve the same purpose would be to require braces in selection and iteration statements, and to add an "elseif" or "elsif" keyword to replace "else if" chains. That's what Perl does, and it works pretty well. Of course it would break a lot of existing C code, which is why it will never happen in any language named "C".