Why do Perl control statements require braces?

Question

This may look like the recent question that asked why Perl doesn\'t allow one-liners to be \"unblocked,\" but I found the answers to that question unsatisfactory because they ei

Answer 1

Isn't it that Perl allows you to skip the braces, but then you have to write statement before condition? i.e.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $a = 1;

if ($a == 1) {
    print "one\n";
}

# is equivalent to:

print "one\n" if ($a == 1);