There is some historical precedent for what you said. The first programming languages were assembly languages, which only have statements that you write one per

There is some historical precedent for what you said. The first programming languages were assembly languages, which only have statements that you write one per line. You can sort of say that each instruction name is a "keyword". mov eax ebx jump 1235 xor eax eax The first big programming language with expressions was Fortran. Its expressions were for mathematical formulas. Everything else was a statement that you still had to write one per line (and in under 80 columns, to fit in a punch card). Part of the reason fortran was like this is that parsing algorithms were quite primitive. Ideas such as lexing, "tokens", and context-freem grammars, which are standard today, weren't common back then. For example both of the following were valid ways to start a loop in Fortran. Note the lack of whitespace in the second! do i = 1, 10 doi = 1,10 Moving on, as compiler writers got better at parsing it became more popular to allow free formatting in programming languages. Instead of mandating one statement per line, use semicolons as statement terminators and let you format it as you see fit. Over time this led to a blurrying of the distinction between statement and expression. For example, in C and Javascript many things that used to be statements are now expressions (one notable example being assignments). This is taken the furthest in functional programming languages, where almost everything is an expression.