Good news is I can offer you parentheses, but they are indeed optional on conditionals/loops. I am fairly sure there are other C-style syntaxes that leave those out. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2061593/why-do-c-languag... - you can't have the same ambiguity if you have mandatory braces around the body. Would there be a reason to require them?

With that said, this will work just fine and you wouldn't have to think about it too hard, if at all:

  func main() {
    if (1 == 2) {
      println("oh no!");
    } else {       
      println("phew!");
    }
  }

Mileage may of course vary and you may think that balance is actually nowhere to be seen. That's great, hit me with it.