&gt; Fortunately C is a much smaller and simpler language than C++.  Isn&#x27;t the C++ standard almost 1000 pages?<p>The language specification itself is only about ~450 pages,  the rest is library. It of course inherits all of the insanity of C on top of that (~170 pages of C language spec), which I&#x27;d argue brings a disproportionately large share of the pain.<p>Alex&#x27;s point is that the standard doesn&#x27;t really begin to give you  an idea how hard it is to write an implementation, or make decisions about everything that&#x27;s unspecified or  ambiguous.