That's the first time I've heard the C syntax being called "too rich". It's the epitome of succinctness IMHO (too a fault, even, or maybe I'm just old). Are you confusing it with C++? If so, you have a point.
As a Lisper I would consider C having too much syntax. 3 different kinds of brackets, a mix of prefix, suffix, and infix operators, both dot and hyphen + greater than symbol infixes for member access on structures depending on whether you're accessing members of a struct directly or from a struct pointer, semicolons at the end of every statement, the different ways of declaring imports,...
C's syntax is pretty lacking by modern standards, requiring gross things like The Lexer Hack to resolve ambiguities that other languages just don't suffer from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexer_hack . To say nothing of the madness that is C's type declaration syntax, necessitating tools like https://cdecl.org/ and "the spiral rule" for reading type declarations (which doesn't actually produce the correct result anyway).
So "modern standard" is to make it easier for compiler writers instead of programmer to read the code? Thanks god C designers had their priorities elsewhere.
>>"the spiral rule"
Not a problem in 99.99% of cases where it's just:
type name = something;
I am talking about C syntax, not absurdely grotesque ultra-complex syntax like the ones from c++, java and similar (is that true that rust syntax is not that much less worse than c++ one now?).
We need a new C, fixed, leaner and less complex: primitives are all sized (u64, u8, f64, etc), only one loop primitive (loop{}), no switch, no enum, no typedef, no typeof and other c11 _generic/etc, no integer promotion, no implicit casts (except for void* and literal numbers?), real hard compiler constants, current "const" must go away (I don't even talk about "restrict" and similar), no anonymous code block, explicit differentiation between reinterpret,runtime,etc casts?, synchronous numeric computation handling, anonymous struct/union for complex memory layouts, and everything else I am currently forgetting about.
(the expression evaluation of the C pre-processor would require serious modifications too)
We need clean and clear cut definitions, in regards of ABIs, of argument passing by value of aggregates like structs/arrays, you know, mostly for those pesky complex numbers and div_t.
We need keywords and official very-likely-to-be-inline-or-hardware-accelerated-functions, something in between the standard library and the compiler keywords, for modern hardware architecture programming like memory barriers, atomics, byte swapping, some bitwise operations (like popcnt), memcpy, memcmp, memmove, etc.
In the end, I would prefer to have a standard machine ISA (RISC-V) and code everything directly in assembly, or with very high level languages (like [ecma|java]script, lua, etc) with a interpreter coded in that standard machine ISA assembly (all that with a reasonable SDK, ofc)
New C is old B? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)
I implemented some examples using B language. I like its typeless and simplicity. It would be nice if there was a modern and mature implementation of this language, it's a true portable assembler.
