Guy Steele once quipped (paraphrasing) that the most challenging thing about programming language design is the small number of paired brace characters in ASCII

Guy Steele once quipped (paraphrasing) that the most challenging thing about programming language design is the small number of paired brace characters in ASCII. Wasting one of these pairs for blocks the way C does is criminal. This forced C++ to co-opt < and > for templates, with all the parsing horror that ensued. Think how much nicer it would be if C++ template parameters had their own legitimate brace pair – like say { }. Having significant indentation like Python is another option, but one I've never cared much for – it makes cutting and pasting code a bit of a nightmare, among other things.