I get that you're frustrated, but... it's unhelpful to dream up reasons for something decades after the fact happened. The more reasonable explanation is that t

I get that you're frustrated, but... it's unhelpful to dream up reasons for something decades after the fact happened. The more reasonable explanation is that they're designed that way, so that the compiler can verify particular properties of the code and because back then the performance difference really mattered. That in turn has some costs on development speed in the prototyping phase. Can anyone seriously argue that our industry has a problem with development speed? And that extra speed will evaporate once the code base becomes big enough and one needs 1:1 test-to-code lines to keep the thing under control.