No, I think everyone should use Emacs on FreeBSD, but that's not my point. Adding syntactic sugar to a language makes the language bigger and harder to complet

No, I think everyone should use Emacs on FreeBSD, but that's not my point. Adding syntactic sugar to a language makes the language bigger and harder to completely understand, it makes it easier to misuse a feature (and C already has a lot of trickery with types, like when you declare a parameter as an array but it behaves like a pointer). I'm a strong believer that implicit is better than explicit and that while there are many ways to do the same thing some are better than other in practice. Of course, "in practice" can change from one project to the other, what matters in consistency. I applaud the choice of Go to standardize on a single coding style for instance. For the particular example of the parent, while I write a lot of C code for work and for fun I have yet to encounter a situation where I saw a function taking 10 floats as arguments and thinking "yup, that's completely the right way to do that". If you have an example of such a code I'd me more that willing to reconsider my position, otherwise we're just talking about the best way to tame a unicorn.