[COFF] Re: C with Improvements :-)

Your points are not about C's semantics, and only sort of about C's syntax; they are more formatting. In fact, it would be really easy to write something to switch a module betweeen your preferred formatting, and 'standard' (for the local value of 'standard') formatting. A minor comment about your first point. I was just reading some old code of mine, and ran across a procedure declaration of the form: foo(string, special) char *string, special; Your preferred form (_without_ changing C's _formal_ syntax) that puts the indirection level with the type has the problems that i) it would make the declaration above potentially confusing (unless one mentally edits the line back to 'classic' C formatting as one reads it; is 'special' a 'char', or a 'pointer to char'; the 'classic' form is quite clear about that); ii) one can only list a single variable per line without changing C's syntax. E.g. (in standard C) if you want to have two pointers declared on one line one would have to say (in standard C): char* ptra, *ptrb; In short, there are good reasons to associate the indirection level with the variable (standard C), and not with the type (yours). Although I gather that you'd probably like to change C's formal syntax, to associate the indirection level with the type, not with the variable. So one could say: char* ptra, ptrb; One could no longer, though, say: char *string, special; One change I would have made to C, in the past, was to add valof/resultis (from BCPL; lacking in C). That's because C macros that return values _have_ to use _only_ expressions (e.g. ((expr0) ? expr1 : expr2)), not more complex code like 'case' (which valof/resultis would let you do). Of course, modern compilers do optimizations that make that a lot less necessary. The thing I would still add to C is condition handling (although I have written assembler packages that added a very efficient one to C without changing the C language; and JTW and someone did a less capable one entirely in C - mine had unwind protects). Explaining why condition handlers are a good thing I don't have the time/energy to do right now, but I can explain it if people want to hear it. Noel