In the words of my combinatorics professor, Dave Bayer:<p>> It is hard to shed prejudices about how code should look, even if learning to see clearly past convention is the only good reason to be a mathematician. I'm already quite sure how I will die: I'll read another article on Hacker News about a new programming language where I see nothing new, and I'll read that they included {}; to make C programmers comfortable. I'll have a massive stroke.
"In addition to missing lowercase, ASCII 1963 and the Model 33 lacked { } curly braces, | vertical bar, ` backtick, and ~ tilde, and they had ↑ up arrow instead of ^ caret and ← left arrow instead of _ underscore."<p>explains why Smalltalk used the up arrow and left arrow for fairly reasonable punctuation for return and assignment.<p>Up arrow was replaced much later by caret and left arrow was sadly replaced by :=
Interesting. I do not remember exactly what system or language I used in collage, but for some reason I thought a { and } was encoded as [[ and ]] or some kind of double character like that. I new Fortran at the time, but that other language needed '{}'.