I don't think parentheses around if-conditions are related to C variable declarations (if that's what you were saying), and I think it's fair to say that C's sy

I don't think parentheses around if-conditions are related to C variable declarations (if that's what you were saying), and I think it's fair to say that C's syntactical terseness is unmatched. The parentheses are required to separate the condition from the following conditional statement.