We see that a lot in other languages too (taking curly braces as parens too). There have been many attempts at languages that separate (or even do away with) t

We see that a lot in other languages too (taking curly braces as parens too). There have been many attempts at languages that separate (or even do away with) the textual representation vs what is shown and interacted with in integrated tooling. Seemingly it has nice properties like forbidding invalid syntax. So far the common textual representation seems to be important enough to win over the AST languages.