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

[Henry Gouk via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 May 2016 at 04:23:48 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.

An example of this would be that Apple SSL bug that has largely 
been blamed on optional curly braces for if statements with one 
line in the body.