I never said it wasn't a feature. There was a time, and there are still certain specific domains, where bit bashing the way C lets you is a big benefit to have.

I never said it wasn't a feature. There was a time, and there are still certain specific domains, where bit bashing the way C lets you is a big benefit to have. But bug or not, I think it's reasonable to call these limitations as far as general-purpose programming goes. My argument was that C puts the onus on the user to work within those limitations. Implementing your own bounds checks, doing shared memory management, all that stuff, is extra work that you either have to do yourself or know and trust a library enough to use it, and in either case carry around the weight of having to know that nonstandard stuff.