The irony is that Pike's previous language, Limbo, did use colons here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)#Examples https://en.wikipedia

The irony is that Pike's previous language, Limbo, did use colons here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)#E... I can only assume he removed them, not for brevity, but as a compromise for the sake of C programmers to only ask them to learn one new thing rather than two.