yeah but everyone knows that "there is no +"; It's an operator, and in C, anyways operators are special and expected to not necessarily do C-function-ey things

yeah but everyone knows that "there is no +"; It's an operator, and in C, anyways operators are special and expected to not necessarily do C-function-ey things, e.g, "take arguments of different types and add them successfully" not everyone is aware that C has "anointed functions" (including, I believe malloc) that the compiler is allowed to fiddle with.