IMO the main thing that made Pascal verbose is begin...end for all compound statements. If you ditch that - as even Wirth himself did in the next iteration, Modula-2 - the rest is much more palatable. Consider:
(* Pascal *)
if a > b then
begin
blah;
blah;
end
else
begin
blah;
blah;
end;
-- Ada
if a > b then
blah;
blah;
else
blah;
blah;
end if;
// C
if (a > b) {
blah();
blah();
} else {
blah();
blah();
}
Pascal is clearly very verbose here, but the other two are pretty similar.
That said I think that punctuation to delimit blocks makes more sense because it makes program structure clearly distinct. Although by the same token I think I'd prefer conditionals and loops to also be symbolic operators, so that there are no keywords inside executable code, only identifiers. Basically something like "?" instead of "if", "@" instead of "while" etc.
