[suspended_state]

So you were criticizing the C language syntax, without considering the context which it was designed in.

Just to give this context a little bit more substance, Pascal was designed to work on a mainframe which could address up to 4MB of RAM, with a typical setup of around 1MB (it's actually not the real amounts: the CDC-6600 the values are 128Kwords, but it had 60 bits word). These machine were beasts designed for scientific computation.

The first C compiler was implemented on a PDP-11, which could handle up to 64KB of RAM, and had 16bits words.

I assume that these constraints had a heavy influence on how each language was designed and implemented.

Note that I wasn't aware of all these details before writing this comment, I had to check.

See: http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/zurich-pascal-comp...

Regarding the C compiler, it is likely that the first version was written in assembly language, which was later "translated" to C.

An early version of the compiler can be found there: https://github.com/theunafraid/first_c_compiler and does look like assembly hand converted to (early) C.