Good news is I can offer you parentheses, but they are indeed optional on conditionals/loops. I am fairly sure there are other C-style syntaxes that leave those out. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2061593/why-do-c-languag... - you can't have the same ambiguity if you have mandatory braces around the body. Would there be a reason to require them?

With that said, this will work just fine and you wouldn't have to think about it too hard, if at all:

  func main() {
    if (1 == 2) {
      println("oh no!");
    } else {       
      println("phew!");
    }
  }

On the more general point, why this vs. anything else? That's a great question. I have tried to hit a balance that I think is pleasant to write code in (e.g. I like not having __init__.aria files around to define modules :-), and I like having proper enums, and so on...). I like to think someone would pick up Aria because it is a fun little language to try out and experiment with, not because it would change the world.

Mileage may of course vary and you may think that balance is actually nowhere to be seen. That's great, hit me with it.