[gingerBill]

I tried my best to be very clear within this article that I am talking about two specific things: DECLARATION SYNTAX and SEMICOLONS. This does not extend to anything else. In fact I got so frustrated with people like yourself who are wrongly interpreting the article that way and extrapolating too much that I had to write a new article: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/02/21/does-syntax-ma...

"Does Syntax Matter?" And the first one is "Yes."

And all languages can have their declaration syntaxes categorized into one of the three I mention. This is not limited to ALGOLs. And I have come across "really interesting language syntax". I am not talking about that in this article.

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Ergonomics does matter and it's not just about optimizing for typing either. It's actually all about coherency and consistency, something I go into depth into the following article on syntax.

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I am not "conflating" a semicolon with statement terminators, I am using that as shorthand as most languages that most people encounter (not all languages, obviously) will use semicolons. Python's approach to parsing is a form of automatic semicolon insertion, even if most people don't think of it that way.

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And I do not like Python's approach requiring significant whitespace of "blocks" through indentation. I much prefer using something like braces, or an `end` keyword, etc, literally because it prevents the problems that significant whitespace introduces. I am not getting into that argument here; please don't start it.