That's the first time I've heard the C syntax being called "too rich". It's the epitome of succinctness IMHO (too a fault, even, or maybe I'm just old). Are you confusing it with C++? If so, you have a point.
>>"the spiral rule"
Not a problem in 99.99% of cases where it's just: type name = something;
with maybe * and [] somewhere.
We need a new C, fixed, leaner and less complex: primitives are all sized (u64, u8, f64, etc), only one loop primitive (loop{}), no switch, no enum, no typedef, no typeof and other c11 _generic/etc, no integer promotion, no implicit casts (except for void* and literal numbers?), real hard compiler constants, current "const" must go away (I don't even talk about "restrict" and similar), no anonymous code block, explicit differentiation between reinterpret,runtime,etc casts?, synchronous numeric computation handling, anonymous struct/union for complex memory layouts, and everything else I am currently forgetting about.
(the expression evaluation of the C pre-processor would require serious modifications too)
We need clean and clear cut definitions, in regards of ABIs, of argument passing by value of aggregates like structs/arrays, you know, mostly for those pesky complex numbers and div_t.
We need keywords and official very-likely-to-be-inline-or-hardware-accelerated-functions, something in between the standard library and the compiler keywords, for modern hardware architecture programming like memory barriers, atomics, byte swapping, some bitwise operations (like popcnt), memcpy, memcmp, memmove, etc.
In the end, I would prefer to have a standard machine ISA (RISC-V) and code everything directly in assembly, or with very high level languages (like [ecma|java]script, lua, etc) with a interpreter coded in that standard machine ISA assembly (all that with a reasonable SDK, ofc)
stdint.h already gives you that.
>> only one loop primitive (loop{}), no switch, no enum
I don't think you will find many fans of that.
>> atomics
check stdatomic.h
>>some bitwise operations (like popcnt)
Check stdbit.h in C23