Does C actually need ; {}[]?

We followed up with two studies on the accuracy rates of novices using a total of six programming languages: Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, Randomo, and Quorum. Randomo was designed by randomly choosing some keywords from the ASCII table (a metaphorical placebo). To our surprise, we found that languages using a more traditional C-style syntax (both Perl and Java) did not afford accuracy rates significantly higher than a language with randomly generated keywords, but that languages which deviate (Quorum, Python, and Ruby) did.

"In 1969, AT&&T had just terminated their work with the
GE/Honeywell/AT&&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started
working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH
labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a
hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the
Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as
complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more
risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped
version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually
trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional
cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped
when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);