Why does a programming language need keywords?

Question

For example (in C):

int break = 1;
int for = 2;

Why will the compiler have any problems at all in deducing that break and fo

Answer 1

several reasons:

• The keywords may seem unambiguous in your samples. But that is not the only place you would use the variable 'break' or the variable 'for'.

• writing the parser would be much harder and error prone for little gain.

• using a keyword as a function or procedure name in a library may have undesired, possibly security relevant, side effects.