Sure, you can apply a CPS conversion to a C program, but what you would get would actually be a (abstract) function call stack because there is nothing in C tha

Sure, you can apply a CPS conversion to a C program, but what you would get would actually be a (abstract) function call stack because there is nothing in C that breaks the call stack paradigm (setjmp/longjmp come close but the semantics are carefully defined to avoid breaking the semantics of a call stack; in particular they cannot be used to "restore" stack frames that were previously destroyed by a return statement or a call to longjmp). In some languages (like Scheme) it is possible to write code that will not have that "de facto" call stack because there is first-class support for things that completely break the call stack paradigm (e.g. call/cc).