"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.