The "for" structure introduced by the C programming language in 1974 was a very big mistake.

It has forced all programmers to write everyday a lot of superfluous boilerplate for the most frequently used kinds of loops as the price for being able to write some very rarely used kinds of loops.

A much better solution would have been to keep the kind of "for" loop used in PL/I and ALGOL 68, 2 languages from which C has taken many other features, and to add an extra kind of "for", for the rarely used loops.

An even better solution had been found quasi-simultaneously with C in the programming languages Alphard and CLU, where instead of inventing this kind of complex "for", they invented iterators, which allow the writing of "forall" loops having the same form as that for arrays or for arithmetic progressions, but for arbitrary data structures.

Iterators solve in a more ergonomic way the problem for which the C "for" was invented, i.e. to write loops that visit all the members of a linked list or similar data structures.

Your example is also solved trivially in a language with iterators, you just define a geometric progression as a generic type and then you can write a "forall" loop that iterates over all its elements.

The fact that the language C permits to omit the curly braces around a single statement helps to reduce its excessive verbosity, but not enough.

In your "if" example, you have 4 syntactic tokens: "if", "(", ")" and ";".

This is still an extra token in comparison with ALGOL 68, where your example would be written so:

  if x <= 0 then
    throw ParameterException fi

which uses only 3 syntactic tokens. The opening parenthesis that must follow C keywords like "if", "for", "while" is always a superfluous syntactic token.

For the verbosity of a programming language, only the number of syntactic tokens matters, because, depending on the preferences of the programmer, one syntactic token can be represented by either a long keyword or by an abbreviation or by a single symbol.

If minimum verbosity is desired, single symbols can be used for each syntactic token, e.g. in my own programming language the 3 syntactic tokens of ALGOL 68 would be single symbols:

  { x <= 0 ?
     throw ParameterException }