>2) Personally I think white space IMPROVES code readability. There is no performance penalty since the compiler discards it all.

white space: yes. unnecessary blank lines: not for me...
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>>My biggest problem(s) with the '{' are that
>>1) They're WAY too easy to lose track of. If you absolutely must have something to designate the beginning and ending for a code chunk, what's wrong with 'begin' and 'end'? Much easier to keep track of
>>2) The fact that, because of 1, people will put them on separate lines, increasing the white space in a program and (to me) making it more difficult to read and to follow the logic flow. I have the same issue when people comment out huge swathes of code rather than remove it after a set period of time. Seriously, we've got programs that have 100's of lines that were commented out in 2005.
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