Why do Perl control statements require braces?

Question

This may look like the recent question that asked why Perl doesn\'t allow one-liners to be \"unblocked,\" but I found the answers to that question unsatisfactory because they ei

Answer 1

Perhaps not directly relevant to your question about (presumably) Perl 5 and earlier, but…

In Perl 6, control structures do not require parentheses:

if $x { say '$x is true' }

for  -> $s { say "[$s]" }

This would be horrendously ambiguous if the braces were also optional.