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

[ag0aep6g via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 May 2016 at 03:48:09 UTC, Joe Duarte wrote:
> Why are curly braces and semicolons necessary? What information 
> do they carry that a compiler could not otherwise reliably 
> obtain?

Something that hasn't been mentioned so far:

Generating source code is easier with braces. String mixins would 
be more complicated with significant indentation.