I agree with you, you can certainly do it, but whatever you do is not the standard that every language talks, because that standard is C :). I can add all the

I agree with you, you can certainly do it, but whatever you do is not the standard that every language talks, because that standard is C :). I can add all the metadata comments I want to my C header saying that the int I return from foo() is an error code, but I'm not going to get Java, C#, Haskell, COBOL, and so on to agree on that new metadata, specially not when each of them would probably come up their own solution. That C became a standard glue that everyone agrees on was a miracle. I can't think of many other standards that pulled that off. It's not happening again. Hence any improvement to C, and C specifically, benefits everyone. Adding extra crap outside the standard does not accomplish the same purpose. I've actually thought of defining such a thing before, but I'd just be reimplementing SWIG, and of course the problem with SWIG is that they have to make all the infrastructure to support the different languages, it isn't the language developers themselves developing the interface (pinvoke, jni, etc.)