Meanwhile, I'm trying to get away from languages where whitespace has semantics.

Very few where you can delete or insert whitespace at will, (even if only in the middle of 'identifiers').

I am fine with a (single) space being an important part of syntax, just don't use more than 1 please.

It's not about semantics at all. whitespace has (virtually) no semantics in C or C++, but there are few programmers who would feel comfortable reading such code without the suggestive hinting that indentation provides.