Oberon+ is not set in stone; if there are good ideas that fit into the concept of simplicity and add significant value, they should be considered. From my point of view, however, one should rather avoid proliferation, as one can observe it with e.g. C#, C++ or TypeScript.

You appear to be familiar with Pascal, so I am surprised you find the statement-heavy approach an issue. What would be the benefit of making this change?

I guess you could make changes like that while keeping backward compatibility with older Oberon, but that's probably kind of a pain, no? I agree that such changes would make Oberon more to my taste.

Maybe what we really want would be semantically close to Oberon+ but abandoning Wirth's surface syntax. (You could still respect the design discipline of allowing a simple fast compiler.)

The reason pascal is so easy to work with is that each phase of a program is separate... you have your Units, then types, variables, functions, procedures, and blocks of code all separate

making a mish-mash of variable declarations and code would make it quite easy to inadvertently add a new variable similar, but not identical to an existing one, for example.

It's good that procedures and functions in pascal are different. One of the big problems with C is that you can leave function results dangling, which works against the clean separation of purposes... procedures have side effects, functions tend not to (but can).

One of the most clever things in pascal is assignments := are very hard to confuse with tests for equality =. You're not likely to accidentally confuse them.