> Rust is the en vogue tool of the moment and it's objectively harder to read than C
I think you're just used to C syntax. I find Rust syntax much easier to read than C syntax (and that was already true when I didn't know either language well).
I think you're just used to C syntax. I find Rust syntax much easier to read than C syntax (and that was already true when I didn't know either language well).
When you have an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to how infamously hard your language is to parse, you have no choice but to admit that you've messed up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexer_hack
And let's not forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_else
C++ must be comparatively a lot harder to parse -- C++ syntax is a huge amount of complexity added to a system that wasn't designed with that in mind.
That you link "Dangling else" is curious. The wikipedia page talks about "ambiguity" but in my mind it's no different than the ambiguity in "a + b * c", does it mean "(a + b) * c" or "a + (b * c)"? Well, make a choice and write it down.
Or don't and don't allow unnecessary ambiguity. For * and +, there's a agreed upon order of operations far more universal than a programming language, but it's sensible to use a partial order so nobody is mistaken about whether e.g. logical or and bitshift binds tighter. Similary C counld have just not have allowed omitting the braces around single-line else clauses and would have been a simpler language for it.
So... we collectively made a choice and wrote it down, then? I think you whooshed on the point. The if/else ambiguity is just a precedence rule, like many others in the expression grammar of every (well, every non-lisp) language that exists.
Which is a flaw that other languages don't have to deal with, because they learned from C's mistakes. There's no justifiable reason for a language's grammar to make this sort of thing necessary. C would be better--and simpler--without it.
I would like to have a better syntax too but it's a tradeoff. I really want to like more algebraic syntaxes like Zig/Odin/Jai but C's terseness and ease of use for the common, simple cases is unmatched unfortunately.
rust surely has it's issues, but reading types is not one of them. whatever you put inside the <> of a outermost symbol is a straightforward tree parse.
C type syntax has a simple guiding principle, there is no type syntax and "declaration follows usage" i.e. normal expression syntax. A few ugly additions that don't cleanly fit in this model were made later for practical reasons, but they don't change the basic idea, which is that there is so little to C type syntax that you can barely see it (which may also be why it's so easy to read once you've grokked it).