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

[Kagamin via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 May 2016 at 03:48:09 UTC, Joe Duarte wrote:
> I'm a social scientist and I'm preparing some studies on the 
> effects of programming language syntax on learning, motivation 
> to pursue programming, as well as any disproportionate effects 
> that PL syntax has on the appeal of programming to women (more 
> on the latter in a separate post).

Do you study, how sumo wrestling and coal mining appeal to women?

> Would it be difficult to compile the clean version? Would there 
> be issues with the design of the lexer/parser? I assume the 
> compiler would recognize keywords like return (and a clean 
> syntax could drive different rules for what statements and 
> expressions could appear on the same line and so forth).

You can write Python code with semicolons: 
http://ideone.com/3Qo5bD python has the cost of having them, but 
not the benefit.

Also: dynamic vs static typing.

> I'm just thinking that Facebook has built software that 
> recognizes my face in other people's pictures, so it seems like 
> building software that understands structured text would be a 
> solved problem.

The unsolved problem is who will donate computation power to my 
brain.