OT: Punctuation-starved Programming Languages

Yeah, this is OT -- *except* in my hope that perhaps some *vintage* language might fit the bill... Most modern programming languages rely extensively on punctuation in their syntax. Many older languages weren't quite as aggressive -- or *expressive*. Or, could shed the use of some punctuation for minor tradeoffs in programming style. E.g., an explicit statement delimiter can be "made redundant" by using an IMPLICIT delimiter (like a newline). If you accept *classic* operators represented by punctuation (e.g., infix binary operators) as intuitive special cases, it seems that many of the other operators could be done away with in procedural languages... *EXCEPT* parenthesis/brackets/braces (!) (ignoring, for the time, the lisp dialects that are obsessed with them :> ) So, the question: are (were) there any useful languages designed that did not rely heavily on punctuation in their syntax? It almost seems an inconsistency -- older languages tended to be skimpy in their syntax (e.g., short identifiers, global scope, etc.) which would suggest that punctuation exploits would be MORE valuable to them. --don