People assuming C is a big byte array is one of the most common source of difficult to debug bugs. People write code assuming they can manipulate bits and bytes

People assuming C is a big byte array is one of the most common source of difficult to debug bugs. People write code assuming they can manipulate bits and bytes here and there using pointer arithmetic because "they know" that this offset into an array will align with this member of that type. Then they come crying that the compiler is broken and change their optimizer setting to -O0 .... I still like your analogy, as when things are down executing it is as you say just on big byte array, you should never try to map this array to the language manually though.