The language could satisfy the trolls at both sides of the semicolons/braces fence: your favorite editor/IDE could support your style (with two-way tools). As

The language could satisfy the trolls at both sides of the semicolons/braces fence: your favorite editor/IDE could support your style (with two-way tools). As for the preferred format, I suspect code with ; and {..} may remove some ambiguity, so it should execute faster. That's the decisive argument in my book. Besides being useful by itself, I understand Dart as an intermediate language: other languages should compile into Dart. Its syntax should be extremely consistent, so code can be reasoned about. For one day we'll need 99% accurate machine translation, like from chinese to english and back, but from Perl to Python or Javascript. In some respects that should be easier: translated functions can be tested to work identically.