Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really know what you mean by "worst-designed syntax". Do you mean that the design process was bad, or that the result is bad?
I meant exactly what the parent-comment pointed out - that C can't be parsed without a symbol table. Like the example on wikipedia: A * B; Which either represents a multiplication or a pointer of type A* to B, depending what the symbol table looks like. That means parsing C is impossible without these hacks, and you need to basically parse the whole file to build up this information. A lot text editors which only sup…
Just to give this context a little bit more substance, Pascal was designed to work on a mainframe which could address up to 4MB of RAM, with a typical setup of around 1MB (it's actually not the real amounts: the CDC-6600 the values are 128Kwords, but it had 60 bits word). These machine were beasts designed for scientific computation.
The first C compiler was implemented on a PDP-11, which could handle up to 64KB of RAM, and had 16bits words.
I assume that these constraints had a heavy influence on how each language was designed and implemented.
Note that I wasn't aware of all these details before writing this comment, I had to check.
See: http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/zurich-pascal-comp...
Regarding the C compiler, it is likely that the first version was written in assembly language, which was later "translated" to C.
An early version of the compiler can be found there: https://github.com/theunafraid/first_c_compiler and does look like assembly hand converted to (early) C.