I teach C as a second language. It is useful to learn from a historical perspective and because so much software is written in it, but I find it doesn't give th

I teach C as a second language. It is useful to learn from a historical perspective and because so much software is written in it, but I find it doesn't give that good understanding of machines compared to say java, and many of the problems are C specific. By "C specific" I mean reading from freed variables, or going out of bounds in arrays. These bugs are horrible to find, but also don't map cleanly to the underlying machine, because often the compiler will optimise away invalid accesses, or move them somewhere weird, meaning you can't use your understanding of the real machine to understand the C bug.