that's not so strange in computer languages, in C: 
if (COND) BLOCK

[download]
as you can see, there are no commas and if BLOCK is surrounded by {} you can avoid the semicolon, too.
Same applies to for, while.

The only difference between those languages and perl1 is that perl allow more freedom: in some cases you can avoid (), there are more tokens which means the same (for, foreach), and the same token may have more available syntaxes (if (COND) { BLOCK },  EXPR if COND;) and so on. Probably Wirth would not like it, but i don't like pascal, so... :)

Oha

1 - The OP didn't compared perl to other langs, but i hope this diversion can be partially OT.

In reply to Re: Comma's and blocks by oha
in thread Comma's and blocks by zer

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.