I think the author is seeing things in C's for loop construct that aren't there. C's syntax is conspicuously clean of unnecessary abstraction. The for construct

I think the author is seeing things in C's for loop construct that aren't there. C's syntax is conspicuously clean of unnecessary abstraction. The for construct is just three expressions grouped together for the sake of being convenient. It's not a coroutine. The head of the loop can't be a separate context, or part of the loop's scope: it's not inside the curly braces (which aren't part of the loop, anyway; you can use them anywhere -- loops don't have a scope). The first clause is available to initialize variables, but it's perfectly good style to leave it blank and use an already-initialized variable. It doesn't want to be an anonymous function with its own scope and parameters, because then you couldn't do this: int c; for(c=0; str[c] != '\0'; c++) {} printf("Length of string = %d\n", c); C doesn't have a message or a worldview. It's just about saving typing and making common things convenient.