[Noumenon]

If you think of C as the closest thing to a “platform independent assembly language” as can exist, it starts to make more sense.

I can certainly see that, but it's the nuts-and-bolts, practical side of understanding the structure, the grammar and the maddening, seemingly cryptic application of indentation that makes me crazy. T-SQL, BASIC, PASCAL and other database programming languages were never that hard to understand. Boy - did date myself with that.

[krb]

seemingly cryptic application of indentation

With C you can indent any way you want. The BNF grammar for C considers tabs, spaces, and newlines as whitespace.