[ Cross-posted by invitation, from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

Should statements have explicit terminators, like the semicolon of Perl and the C language? Or should they avoid the clutter, and separate statements by giving whitespace syntactic significance and a real effect on the semantics, as is done in Python and Javascript?

Actually we don't have to go either way. As an example, let's look at some BNF-ish DSL. It defines a small calculator. At first glance, it looks as if this language has taken the significant-whitespace route -- there certainly are no explicit statement terminators.