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

"Okay, so normally, you need braces around blocks, but not if the block is only one statement long, except, of course, if your statement would be ambiguous in a way that would be ruled by precedence rules not like you want if you omitted the braces -- in this case, you could also imagine the use of parentheses, but that would be inconsistent, because it is a block after all -- this is of course dependent on the respective precedence of the involved operators. In any case, you don't need to put semicolons after closing braces -- it is even wrong if you end an if statement that is followed by an else statement -- except that you absolutely must put a semicolon at the end of a header file in C++ (or was it C?)."

Seriously, I am glad for every explicitness and uniformity in code.