Perhaps more a reply to qwerty than to KT - most languages require the () around the conditional. C/C++ only requires the {} around the body if it's more than one statement. Perl requires both condition and body to be bracketed.
I have to ask why no language (that I know of, at least) requires brackets around the body, but not around the conditional. I would think that, as you say, if you explicitly define the body, then the conditional should be defined implicitly by the bounds set by the conditional command and the body...so what am I missing that all these other languages don't do this?
