[iceflow19]

The syntax is minimalist for a reason. The primary paradigm of languages in the Rebol family (like Red) is language-oriented programming of which creating domain specific languages in an important factor. The more minimalist the base syntax the less you force the end-user into a syntactic corner, when they go to design their own DSL's. As for blocks (those things delimited by brackets) they're technically a data-structure (actually all code is an implicit data structure). In Rebol for example all the typical control flow structures are actually functions which take as arguments vectors of code.