There is another ingredient I failed to make explicit: c syntax was a product of the 70s and it was a tradeoff between writing a parser easily and designing a s

There is another ingredient I failed to make explicit: c syntax was a product of the 70s and it was a tradeoff between writing a parser easily and designing a syntax that would feel reasonably natural to people used to other notations. Surely implicitness and tersness were wisely used in math notations then and now, but devising a formal syntax that would work for C at the time was likely deemed too much work for little gain. there is a lot of random decisions that shaped the C syntax, as it's ultimately a random even that so many modern languages have chosen to continue that trend. My point was more about why it's not completely irrational to use "many different grouping symbols" since math notation also uses many different grouping symbols (rather than arguing the exact reasons this or that symbol is used instead of something else)