> So I guess you could call lack of semicolons syntactic sugar for semicolons.

Yes, exactly. Inconsistent sugar. My early experience with Haskell was that a lot of the syntactic sugar was (or seemed) very brittle -- combined with uninformative error messages -- much like missing semicolons can lead to -- even in Java iirc.

(I believe that is fixed now, however. I still remember it -- contributing to a somewhat irrational fear of Haskell :-).