> It is hard to shed prejudices about how code should look, even if learning to see clearly past convention is the only good reason to be a mathematician. I'm already quite sure how I will die: I'll read another article on Hacker News about a new programming language where I see nothing new, and I'll read that they included {}; to make C programmers comfortable. I'll have a massive stroke.
Also, even in C and C++, they don't indicate branching. You can place a brace block anywhere you can place a normal statement. You might use them in C++ just to delimit the extent of a RAII object. In C89 you might use a block to delay defining a variable until closer to its use, because variables can only be defined at the start of its block (although that no longer applies in C99). Conversely, though it's usually bad practice, you can use if statements and loops with individual statements.
explains why Smalltalk used the up arrow and left arrow for fairly reasonable punctuation for return and assignment.
Up arrow was replaced much later by caret and left arrow was sadly replaced by :=
Some computers going into the 80s, for example the Commodore 8-bit line starting with the PET and going through the Commodore 128, still had ↑ and ← for ^ and _.
