I'm not sure where this meme that C is a direct translation to PDP-11 assembly came from. It's true that there were some quirks in K&R C that came from it (eg,

I'm not sure where this meme that C is a direct translation to PDP-11 assembly came from. It's true that there were some quirks in K&R C that came from it (eg, the way that floats were widened to doubles when being passed to functions), but those largely went away with ANSI C. Other than that, C isn't a significantly better match for PDP-11 than it is for x86 or alpha or sparc.