> Do trigraphs really hurt anyone being there?

They make the compiler more complicated, and nobody uses them today. C has a number of obscure corner cases that makes parsing it a lot harder than it need be. Complexity adds up; death by a thousand cuts.

> GCC is everywhere that C matters, so I just use that.

Have you seen clang? If I want to use another compiler for whatever reason, I can't rely on GCC extensions. It's a good idea so it should be in the standard, dammit. I want tail-calls too while I'm at it, so I can use C as an intermediate language for more advanced languages without the performance hit of trampolines. Portable assembly my arse.

> You can't merge the tails of the strings

Make your own datatype. If you need something obscure like this, that's why ADTs exist. Or be crazy and use a GC so you can slice strings.

Why do we suffer under a long and sordid history of buffer overflow vulnerabilities since C's inception? Null-terminated strings are a bug-prone default thanks to some performance benefit that only applies to the VAX. Not to mention that non-8-bit-clean strings just suck.

> whatever your very-small limit would be

Use a machine word instead of a byte. The string can be as large as your memory space. This is the minimun that the rest of the world uses. Hell, even the masochistic C++ people hate C's strings, although they can't completely escape them.

> local type inference

Put types in the parameter list, like normal. Locals inside the function figure out what they should be based on the signatures of the local and called functions. See what newer versions of C# and D are doing.