Well, I wouldn't be so hard on yourself. IIRC (and I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong), algol introduced block scoping. Whether you use BEGIN/END or {/} I think is a pretty minor point.
C has braces to introduce a new scope. The irony is that JS (until recently) didn't have block scope. It just has braces :-).
Now this is where it gets screwy. You are supposed to (but don't have to usually) add a semi-colon on the end of each statement in Javascript.
a = 52;
This has a semi colon because it is a statement. There is another construct called an expression. An expression is anything that can evaluate to a value. An statement can be an expression (the statement "a = 52;" is an example of that because it also evaluates to 52 and is thus an expression). But there are expressions that are not statements. Here is an example of an expression
(5 * 27)
It evaluates to a value, but doesn't do anything so it is not a statement. Usually in computer languages, if "statements" are actually expressions. So you can say
if (1>0) {"Yay"} else {"Boo"}
evaluates to a value ("Yay" in this case), but doesn't do anything in and of itself. The blocks in the braces may contain statements, but the if is an expression, not a statement. Note the lack of semi-colon. Again, presumably because it is an expression, not a statement.
You can try the above in Node and it will indeed return the value "Yay".
a = if(1>0) {"Yay"} else {"Nay"};
In this case the variable a should be assigned the value "Yay", because the if expression evaluates to a "Yay". For some strange reason (that I don't understand), Javascript (or at least Node, when I tried it) does not accept that. It gives you a syntax error. You can not use if "statements" as expressions in Javascript (which sucks quite a bit).
All of this to say that Javascript appears broken to me, no matter what geneology you assign to it :-D. I personally really like programming in JS (or actually CS), but it is a beast unto itself, I think.
I'd welcome comments illuminating this issue if I've made a mistake with the above! As I said, it's easy to do.
