Someone beat me to the punch, but yeah, at this point, C barely works the way actual computers work under the hood. It works the way a PDP-11 does, and most mo

Someone beat me to the punch, but yeah, at this point, C barely works the way actual computers work under the hood. It works the way a PDP-11 does, and most modern computers have been forced (even at the CPU level) to basically act as PDP-11 emulators. Take, for example, the entire stack-and-heap thing. That's not a bedrock feature of computing; it's merely a thing that was particularly convenient to do on a PDP-11. But if you're working in C, you have to do it - so it stays a "seemingly bedrock" feature even if the hardware has drifted far from the PDP-11. A lot of these features boiled down to the ISA making it fairly convenient to do them that way - there were built-in instructions that made it pretty easy to "color-by-numbers" and get the job done. --- This is similar to how we (societally) did barely any woodworking with screws before we had the industrial processes (like lathes or whatnot) to make them. Nails weren't some magic ground-truth or axiom of woodcrafting - it was just obscenely difficult to craft a screw, so why would anyone in their right mind attempt to build something with them?