Well, we could use braces (’{}’ ) instead of begin and end, but such changes to the language have to be proposed, discussed and accepted. If these changes cause large bodies of existing F77 and older codes to become invalid, there will be a need for compilers to have a legacy mode (or option) to enable these older codes to remain compilable.
Matlab as a programming language has many irregularities, some of which may become major issues when ported to a compiled language. For example, the effective name of the first function in an m-file is taken from the file name and not the declaration of the function.