>1) C developers are huge fans of brevity, so can be expected to prefer curly braces over typing out BEGIN and END. Anyone who uses C# for more than about an hour is going to recognize what curly braces mean.

Also keep in mind that all C and other languages were designed with readability in mind... on a 80x25 screen. If your font selection makes the curly braces vanish in the tangles of code, tweak your editor.