We discuss the benefit of enforcing textual alignment in programming languages proposing unstructured spmd-like collective operations. Our study is based on a simple language which provides support for global synchronization barriers. A formal definition of textual alignment, based on an operational semantics, is considered. We prove that this property entails the absence of deadlocks.. Finally, we provide a compositional denotational semantics which is equivalent to the operational semantics for textually aligned programs.