Yeah, exactly the right question. To me, C is like English, everyone has learned how to speak it. Creating some new syntax is a little like switching to a dif

Yeah, exactly the right question. To me, C is like English, everyone has learned how to speak it. Creating some new syntax is a little like switching to a different language. I find that difficult and annoying. Here's an example. When I was doing the GUI tools for BitKeeper 20 years ago I used Tcl because Tk was (and still is so far as I can tell) the best gui toolkit around. But Tcl? Holy moly, what a miserable language (with apologies, and respect to John O, it's miserable). So I got some compiler people to make a second, parallel, compiler that took what looked like C as input and compiled it down to Tcl byte codes. Pingo! All the power of Tk but with a C-like language on top. And you can call the tcl library code and it can call you. All open source at http://little-lang.org http://little-lang.org I wish someone would take the ideas there and make a gcc/clang dialect that had all C stuff but added in a ref counter and real strings, etc.