An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.