> The first one is pretty C-specific and for example doesn’t exist in Java.

It was just an example, most languages have quirks like this. I don’t know about Java, but in Rust you have the turbofish operator, whose necessity stems from using the less-than sign as both an operator and a delimiter.

> My point was, replacing n syntactic constructs by n functions or macros doesn’t reduce the cognitive load of having to know each of them.

The difference is that if you don’t know a function/macro, you can just read its documentation. If you don’t know a syntactic construct, where do you look?

Another advantage is that if you want to create new functionality similar to existing language features, it won’t stick out like a sore thumb. For example, you could create an until loop:

  (until (window-should-close)
    (draw-screen))
  # is equivalent to
  (while (not (window-should-close))
    (draw-screen))

In Rust, it would have to look completely different from a while loop:

  until!(window_should_close(),
    draw_screen());
  // is equivalent to
  while window_should_close() {
    draw_screen();
  }