If I arrange five biscuits on a plate, you'd prefer to eat the one at zero offset from the edge, rather than take the first biscuit? As for "a computer" - unle

If I arrange five biscuits on a plate, you'd prefer to eat the one at zero offset from the edge, rather than take the first biscuit? As for "a computer" - unless your actually writing code for memory allocation - you are (should be) writing to an abstract machine anyway (trivially, if you want to sum numbers in a dense 10^6 by 10^6 matrix - wouldn't it be nice to utilise 1024 cores if they are available? Unless you have side effects happening, do you really care about the order of additions? And if the numbers are 256 bit integers - do you want to care if they're stored big or little endian, in 8 or 16 bit words? In two's complement?).