>C was designed to let compilers have a field day so that 1980s supercomputers could get 5% more FP performance, by hook or by crook. C was designed to help cr

>C was designed to let compilers have a field day so that 1980s supercomputers could get 5% more FP performance, by hook or by crook. C was designed to help create Unix. It just happened to turn out to be something that could be compiled into more efficient code than most other languages at the time, without being overly difficult to work with. From what I understand, 80s supercomputers were more likely to run Fortran. Fortran has fewer problems with pointer aliasing than C, so a Fortran compiler could generate better code than a C compiler for the type of code they would be running.