I've noticed that there's a strawman that has been left untouched for quite a
while, namely
[strawman:paren_free](http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:paren_free).
It intends to make parentheses in heads optional, making, for instance:
```js
if x > 3 {
/* … */
}
```
equivalent to:
```js
if (x > 3) {
/* … */
}
```
Does anyone know if there are still any efforts to bring this into a future
version of EcmaScript?
The strawman hasn't been updated for five years, and I have the feeling that
this addition was forgotten about.
The last time I've heard anyone from TC39 talk about paren-free heads was at
[GOTO Aarhus 2013](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlqv6NtBXcA).
Note that the strawman also talks about backward compatibility:
> For backward compatibility, we support parenthesized heads with any
> sub-statement. To preserve the LR(1) grammar this requires factoring out
> OtherStatement.
>
> Thus, this proposal is intended to make no backward-incompatible syntactic or
> semantic changes to ES5. “Paren-free” is now > purely a relaxation of syntax
> rules.
If anyone seeks to try this out, Mozilla's
[Narcissus](https://github.com/mozilla/narcissus/) has been supporting it for
years now. You can enable it via `--paren-free`.
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