Comment by inkyoto

The GCC assembly syntax is not a monstrosity, it was a necessity given how GCC represented the intermediate representation of the code. Historical GCC docs actually explain the rationale of the design pretty well.

Moreover, since GCC was one of the very few C compilers that targeted a large number of very diverse ISA's at the time, they wanted to have a uniform way of injecting the assembly code across wildly varying ISA's.