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Is that statement about C based on anything in particular? C was 18th of all the languages in the article's chart (the worst!), which I'd guess was due to the absence of a standard library.

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Fair point. There is a distinction between syntactic efficiency (C is terse) and task-completion efficiency (what the benchmark likely measured). If the tasks involved string manipulation, hash maps, JSON, etc. then C pays a massive token tax because you are implementing what other languages provide in stdlib. Python has dict and json.loads(), C has malloc and strcmp.

So: C tokenizes efficiently for equivalent logic, but stdlib poverty makes it expensive for typical benchmark tasks. Same applies to Factor/Forth, arguably worse.

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