When we talk about something being "C-like", the syntax is what we're talking about. Being "distracted by the syntax" doesn't make sense when the syntax is the entire point of the statement being made.

Admittedly it's been decades since I've done any C (literally since 1999, except for an LD_PRELOAD shim I wrote about 5 years ago) but being someone who prefers C and other ALGOL-syntax derivates I find the syntax to be relatively easy to grok. One advantage over C is that the confusing pointer/array/function pointer thing has a well-defined order in Zig, there's no "spiral order" nonsense going on.

There is no spiral. C's pointer declaration syntax is arguably backwards ("declaration follows usage") but fundamentally follows normal precedence rules. The so-called spiral is total nonsense misinformation.

That's exactly my point. It's confusing enough that someone e made a bullshit claim that was totally wrong and confused noobs for years. That won't happen with zig.

That won't happen with any sane systems language all the way back to Algol dialects.

The only thing that C has taken from Algol, was structured control and data.

The spiral rule works if "pointer to" and "function returning"/"array of" alternate but it breaks if they don't, i.e., if you have arrays of arrays or pointers to pointers.

    int** arr1_of_arr2_of_arr3_of_ptr_to_ptr_to_int[1][2][3]

In this case, spiraling between [1], ×, [2], ×, [3], int is obviously wrong, the correct reading order is [1], [2], [3], ×, ×, int. (Edit: read × = *)

The Right-Left Rule is quoted less frequently on HN but it's a correct algorithm for deciphering C types: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/rt_lt.rule.html

I would name that algorithm "inside-out" instead of "right-left" if my understanding of its behavior is correct.

Aren't you supposed to treat multiple array or pointers as a group?

The fact that it's wrong if you try to generalize it beyond the examples given?

They are both close-to-the-metal, few-abstractions, procedural, imperative Systems programming languages with explicit memory management and layout.

When "we" talk? I suggest that in the future if you mean syntactically similar you say syntactically similar.

But then, of course, it wouldn't have much to do with Zig's "appeal as better C than C", which prompted this whole discussion.

Exactly. I would appreciate an explanation what makes zig c-like if its syntax is nothing like c? What does "c-like" even mean then?