3 ms·

{} are isomorphic to 'begin' and 'end' in that snippet, though. Part of the reason why early programming languages were comparatively heavy on keywords is that

{} are isomorphic to 'begin' and 'end' in that snippet, though. Part of the reason why early programming languages were comparatively heavy on keywords is that the symbol set was not standardized across machines, so you couldn't count on some symbols being available. It's why C still supports <% %> as digraphs for curly braces, or <: :> for square brackets. Also why languages such as COBOL go as far as supporting syntax like DIVIDE X INTO Y, because the machine character set might not have a slash or divide sign.

int_19h 3y ago
They are, but it makes all the difference in practice. You can write "then begin" and "end else begin", but I haven't ever seen Pascal code written in that style, and I can understand why - it's just much less readable. OCaml is nice in that "begin" and "end" are aliases for "(" and ")", so you can use whichever one makes the most sense for readability. Anyway, the point is that the way to go is either 1) make structured programming constructs implicitly compound, so that you don't need braces for multi-statement bodies, or 2) make those braces as compact as possible so that being explicit is not so painful.