I bike-shedded in this thread about exponentiation. But taking a step back the bigger issue is there are so many poorly justified features thrown in. I don't

I bike-shedded in this thread about exponentiation. But taking a step back the bigger issue is there are so many poorly justified features thrown in. I don't have the feeling that the authors appreciate the appeal of C as a simple language that maps closely to hardware features. This is a big random collections of extensions that piqued some implementor's fancy. There is seemingly no effort at narrowing down to the cleanest or most important ideas. It totally kills the clean, simple aesthetics of the the base C languge.