To reiterate, claiming that C can be described as "portable assembly" is not a claim that it is literally a package of assembler macros that emit deterministic

To reiterate, claiming that C can be described as "portable assembly" is not a claim that it is literally a package of assembler macros that emit deterministic machine code for each individual source expression. I linked these in another comment, but here's some examples of straightforward-looking integer addition emitting more complex compiler output for other languages that compile to native code: Haskell: https://godbolt.org/z/vdeMKMETT https://godbolt.org/z/vdeMKMETT C++: https://godbolt.org/z/dedcof9x5 https://godbolt.org/z/dedcof9x5