Try reading a russian sentence if you don't know russian...

Remember that you once thought + - * / where hard to understand.

It is completely irrelevant to show code lines in two languages and ask someone who don't master both languages to compare them. After all, I expect people who maintain a C program to know C (and not just have opened a C book and taken a quick peek).

But why don't you write if your aim is to make it terse?

if (!ready && !length) {
  output = ~output;
  pointer++;
}

but then again, the C language standard specifies the header file iso646.h to contain the following macros:

and &&
and_eq &=
bitand &
bitor |
compl ~
not !
not_eq !=
or ||
or_eq |=
xor ^
xor_eq ^=