> A thought occurs to me: would it be possible to use that compiler to bootstrap your way to a modern C dialect? You don't need to. SmallC is a cross-compiler,

> A thought occurs to me: would it be possible to use that compiler to bootstrap your way to a modern C dialect? You don't need to. SmallC is a cross-compiler, not a self-hosting compiler; it runs on a modern computer, not an 8085. If you wanted to modify SmallC to accept modern C syntax, you can do that without "bootstrapping" anything.