If VB and assembly can work without semicolons I sure such a parser can be written for C. Some of these are leftovers from the bygone era when complex parser/ compilers were difficult to implement. We put all these punctuations for readablity because we put more than 1 statement in one line or use complex statements, which normally is not done in C program. Nor are VB or asm programs any less readable than a C program. For that matter C does not have a logically readable if ..then ..else, it is shortened to if ...else.