Being explicit and clear is must in programming. This is science and/or engineering.
Whitespace delimitation is a great idea every newbie gets but fails miserably in real world. Programming languages have evolved from early simple BASIC style languages into using more explicit and visible delimiters and this is only good. Yes, Python is crap, but it's crap anyway because you can't know whichever version of language happens to work for whatever program. It isn't supposed to be stable, robust or do what you expect it to do, so whitespace control of program flow is just OK for that mindset anyway.
Suck it up and grow up, you'll get used to it in, what, 10 minutes. I had zero problems accepting ; as a 11-year old when I started with C.
Use the same idea whenever designing any ASCII based protocol. Oh lord the time wasted fighting with stupidly designed / buggy whitespace parsers in commercial / industrial equipment such as programmable power supplies and measurement devices, expecting exact combination of \n, \r, \n\r, \r\n or who knows what, coupled with implicit conversions no one wants. The ones designed by me just work because commands and replies are delimited by ; or something else and \r and \n totally ignored, but I'm sure you would hate to use them having to type ; for "do it!" explicitly.