Well people who see no shortcomings in C are of course going to show little interest in considering improvements, I have no idea what the "majority of embedded programmers" think about this subject, but as someone with experience of developing compilers and parsers and optimizers I do have some insights into the question.and adding new keywords to C or the existence of reserved works is a problem that doesn't really exist for the vast majority of embedded programmers. A few new reserved words have been added over the years in C99 and C11.