while this is a very interesting take, I think the premise is a little bit to simple. Firstly, there are at least 3 C compilers in widespread use, from apple,

while this is a very interesting take, I think the premise is a little bit to simple. Firstly, there are at least 3 C compilers in widespread use, from apple, microsoft and gnu, these are a long way from 1 for 1 to each other so when it says for example: ->In other words, while C can compute at compile time a simple expression by constant folding, it cannot execute a function at compile time. Maybe the compiler he tried cannot, but another can, no idea, it wasnt tested, they can be made to (the whole point of the article), apple and microsoft cannot be made to, everything in this article could have have been submitted as a merge request to gnu.... Article doesnt even state whose C compiler they embedded afaict. wrt to "standard" c specifically, there are for sure some hard constraints on all the wild and wacky hardware support required that must make proposing and implementing changes within the c standard extremely hard, max respect to the anonymous experts that have got it to where it is today, but imho a lot of the "why doesnt c" questions can be as easily answered as "why doesnt V8 support 8 bit pic micros".