+1 for the bit about machine generated code. I think if you're going to have significant whitespace, Haskell does the right thing here: the indentation rules ar

+1 for the bit about machine generated code. I think if you're going to have significant whitespace, Haskell does the right thing here: the indentation rules are specified in terms of automatic insertion of braces and semicolons. Almost nobody is them in by hand, but they make codegen easier. Re: the bad merge, that can happen the other way to: this was the cause of Apple's infamous goto fail bug. I think block structured languages should do what go and some others do: braces on conditionals and loops are mandatory, parens are optional.