Good point. This is true. C's roots are in structured assemblers. The alternatives
of the day for low level languages were some very interesting macro processors
like Stage2, TRAC and M4.

Language theory was quite young. C has evolved and there is a significant amount
of work to write a clean parser for it.

w..

Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> > C is significantly harder to write a compiler for than many
> > other languages
>
> The confusion is probably that the C *semantics* (the meanting of the
> program) are relatively easy to translate coompared to many other
> languages (hence: C is a low-level HLL). But the C *syntax* (the format)
> is difficult to parse and interpret.
>


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