Ugly? I rather miss the traditional style of argument passing. My first real paid job used Microware's OS-9 compiler which only supported the traditional syntax, did absolutely no optimisation that I could discern, and made you use "register" if you wanted a local variable assigned to a register instead of always being spilled to the stack. (In fact looking back at it now I wonder if it was just a rebadged PCC).

As an aside it's not always more verbose because you can group parameters by type, eg:

  int foo (c1, i1, c2, i2)
    char c1, c2;
    register int i1, i2;
  {
  ...