There are systems programming languages since JOVIAL in 1958, enough of them to chose from if C had never existed, and what syntaxes would be favoured instead.
replyIt's an interesting thought experiment, but honestly for all its flaws, C did have one large advantage regarding syntax: braces. Even if C had never been invented, at some point people would have noticed that Fortran/Pascal/Whatever style BEGIN ... END blocks are annoying and just a waste of tokens.
replyNah, the advantage was called UNIX, with source code being available for a symbolic price with a C compiler, at least until AT&T got allowed to charge for it, a decade later.
replyYou mean the same people that now write piles of Markdown tokens in plain English?