> The form/function distinction you're making requires the ability to hold two parallel representations of the same code in your head—the visual representation (what it looks like) and the syntactic representation (what it means to the parser), and to know that they're related but different. This is a higher level skill.

My supposition here is that the threshold of skill needed to understand the form/function distinction here is significantly lower than you expect it to be. In written natural language, people don't typically attach semantic meaning to things like indententation, kerning, letter spacing, text alignment, font size, etc., and usually distinguish style from semantics intuitively without having to apply any conscious decision rules. Distinguishing form from content is something we do by nature.

I'd expect that at least those already familiar with natural writing in most modern languages will have a bias toward expecting that whitespace does not have semantic value, while punctuation marks do. Conversely, I'd expect recognizing cases where indentation does control logic flow to be what requires a higher skill level.