The advantage of using C to teach algorithms and/or data structures is that it hides very little of what's actually going on, including allocations. "More code"

The advantage of using C to teach algorithms and/or data structures is that it hides very little of what's actually going on, including allocations. "More code" correlates much more with "more work for the computer" than it does in higher-level languages. If you know what you'd have to do in C to implement a certain feature, you can guess what a high-level language is probably doing under the hood when you use its canned features.