> It is hard to shed prejudices about how code should look, even if learning to see clearly past convention is the only good reason to be a mathematician. I'm already quite sure how I will die: I'll read another article on Hacker News about a new programming language where I see nothing new, and I'll read that they included {}; to make C programmers comfortable. I'll have a massive stroke.

explains why Smalltalk used the up arrow and left arrow for fairly reasonable punctuation for return and assignment.

Up arrow was replaced much later by caret and left arrow was sadly replaced by :=

At least that's how it always in American English, and ASCII. Apparently British English says more than [these] can be "brackets" and <these> were called "angle brackets" in the 1970s, but when did anyone in the computer industry ever start calling anything but {these} braces?

To summarize from the article for { and }:

Modern digraphs:

   <%  ,  %>. This is only one that looks symmetric

  ??<  ,  ??>

   \(  ,  \)

   *(  ,  *)

   $(  ,  $)

   <<  ,  >>    for [ , ]

   (<  ,  >)    for { , }

It also explains why they used the obscure characters {,},|, and ~ while never using the FAR more common # and @. In the Teletype driver, "#" is clear previous char, and "@" is clear current line. So unavailable for C. I will still curse the C designers to my dying day for picking * as the prefix operator for dereference pointer, when the more logical @ character was SITTING RIGHT THERE! On every keyboard! So now every newbie to C has to stop thinking "multiplication" when they see *.