From: bc@freeuk.com   
      
   On 02/12/2025 07:31, David Brown wrote:   
   > On 01/12/2025 23:59, Janis Papanagnou wrote:   
   >> On 2025-12-01 21:06:13, Keith Thompson wrote:   
   >>>   
   >>> The use of curly braces vs. begin/end is IMHO trivial.  [...]   
   >>>   
   >>> Someone who dislikes C for whatever reasons will probably dislike   
   >>> most other languages that use curly braces, and not necessarily   
   >>> because of that one syntactic detail.   
   >>   
   >> There may also be just simple practical real-life facts that   
   >> influence the preferences of languages with curly braces (or   
   >> brackets). I want to remind that keyboards from other domains   
   >> may not have the simple access to the [ ] { } characters! On   
   >> my US keyboard [ and ] are adjacent and directly accessible,   
   >> and { and } are on the same keys reachable simply with 'Shift'.   
   >> That's extremely convenient if you're programming C-like syntax!   
   >> Though on my German keyboard these characters are placed on the   
   >> top numbers row in one line, ordered as { [ ] }, and reachable   
   >> only through the 'Alt Gr' key. This is really a pain to type.   
   >> For _very common characters_ in a fairly common and rich family   
   >> of programming languages it's an issue [in such non-US domains].   
   >>   
   >   
   > My Norwegian keyboard needs AltGr for {[]}, but I don't find it a burden   
   > - it's habit, I suppose.   
   >   
   > But in days gone by if anyone ever needed to use trigraphs for C   
   > programming, then I am sure they would happily switch to a word-based   
   > language given half a chance.  I find "{ }" nicer than "begin end", but   
   > I'd pick "begin end" over "??< ??>" any day!   
   >   
      
   So:   
      
      if .. then begin ... end else begin ... end   
      
   ... represents multiple statements.   
      
   Even I would see braces in a more favourable light. I wonder why it took   
   some years for language designers to realise you could simply have:   
      
      if .. then ... else ... end   
      
   Unfortunately that didn't really work for braces:   
      
      if (..) ... else ... }   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)