Researcher question – what's the point of semicolons and curly braces?

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/2/2016 8:48 PM, Joe Duarte wrote:
> Why are curly braces and semicolons necessary? What information do they
> carry that a compiler could not otherwise reliably obtain?

You are correct in that they are (mostly) redundant. Some ambiguities 
can arise because D is not a whitespace delimited language. However, the 
real reasons are:

1. Redundancy in specification means the compiler can catch more 'typo' 
mistakes rather than having them compile successfully and then behave 
mysteriously. If a language has 0 redundancy, then any 
8745b48%%&*&hjdsfh string would be a valid program. Redundancy is a 
critical feature of high reliability languages.

Many languages have removed redundancy only to put it back in after 
bitter experience. The classic is implicit declaration of variables.

2. The redundancy also means the compiler can 'resync' itself to the 
input once a syntactic error is detected.

3. It's instantly familiar to those who program already in "curly brace" 
languages.