The real problem here is that keywords are in the same namespace as identifiers. If keywords were marked syntactically in some way and in their own namespace, t

The real problem here is that keywords are in the same namespace as identifiers. If keywords were marked syntactically in some way and in their own namespace, there would be less reason to avoid introducing new ones. This is why we end up with _Bool, _Atomic, _Complex, etc., with hacky macro aliases. This is a problem in nearly all programming languages I'm familiar with.