Thanks for the reference! I personally don't think that the qualitative pros/cons of the chosen approach or alternatives that we're discussing today, 30-ish ye

Thanks for the reference! I personally don't think that the qualitative pros/cons of the chosen approach or alternatives that we're discussing today, 30-ish years later, would be all that new to the designers of C in 1993. The difference is that we've had 30-ish years to watch those decisions play out over millions of lines of code in software running at scales and levels of complexity that programmers in 1993 could only dream of. Also, software security was barely an issue in 1993. Today, it's a massive issue.