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Using curly braces or parentheses to signify blocks of code is the trivial and natural way to implement a parser for a programming language. Doing anything else requires a conscious design decision and some effort and extra complexity. The C philosophy is to avoid complexity in the implementation in favor of a slightly more verbose language. The Haskell (ML) philosophy is the exact opposite. These design decisions have been cargo culted by later languages.

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My point of view is:

- make it easy to write and to read at the expense of having complexity in the parser / implementation. Programs (or documents) are written and read a lot of times, it's worth optimizing, as long as it does not make the implementation unmaintainable. I'm saying that as a writer of several manually crafted parsers.

- avoid ambiguities in the grammar at all cost. They just suck for every party involved.

As for indentation vs braces to delimit blocks, I practice both and don't really have any preference.

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