Actually, I think C made the wrong choice here. It's not the braces that are being redundant, but the parentheses!
The parens are there only to avoid syntactic ambiguity if the following statement isn't a block. So the parens are what Perl 6 lets you get rid of:
if $condition { do_something() }
In fact, the braces are much more important in Perl 6 because they almost always indicate a closure, or at least a potential closure. That's important because the braces indicate delayed evaluation. A closure is treated as an argument to the control construct, so you could also write the above
as:
statement:<if>($condition, { do_something() });
But the converse is also true, that if you define your
own statement:<foo> with the same signature,
you can call it as:
foo $condition { do_something() }
just as if it were a built-in control construct. To do this in Perl 5 requires chewing gum and bailing wire, plus assorted smoke and mirrors.
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