The case of Erlang is more or less a matter of preference. I haven't seen any piece of Erlang code with the separator first, except in the case of the if expres

The case of Erlang is more or less a matter of preference. I haven't seen any piece of Erlang code with the separator first, except in the case of the if expression: if Cond1 -> Exp1 ; Cond2 -> Exp2 ; ... -> ... ; CondN -> ExpN end Other than that, meh. I think Erlang just needs to read/write code differently. My blog post on the issue: http://ferd.ca/on-erlang-s-syntax.html http://ferd.ca/on-erlang-s-syntax.html