Well, OK, and I certainly can't refute personal experience even if I don't totally understand it. I played with C parsers (using my own parser generator ... wr

Well, OK, and I certainly can't refute personal experience even if I don't totally understand it. I played with C parsers (using my own parser generator ... written in Modula-2 as it happens) back in '82 and never found the grammar overly intimidating. Of course you're familiar, but just do a quick scroll up and down to remind yourself of the length (or lack of it): https://cs.wmich.edu/~gupta/teaching/cs4850/sumII06/The%20syntax%20of%20C%20in%20Backus-Naur%20form.htm https://cs.wmich.edu/~gupta/teaching/cs4850/sumII06/The%20sy... And it seems 25% of that is the expression syntax which really would be better (more efficiently) handled outside of the grammar via precedence climbing (which would also neatly handle Algol's user-defined precedence), and which would result in a smaller parser as well as faster one. As far as I/O, not sure that Pascal had too much to crow about there ... you could open files, but not close them, no way to associate a filename with a file, a need to put any non-temporary file as a program parameter, the odd file buffer variable concept, with an equally odd syntax treating file types as if they were pointers to the element type... A language that fascinated me at the time, but I never got to play with was Occam - designed specifically for the Transputer which was really way ahead of it's time and never caught on.