C does not require the presentation of memory as a "giant array of bytes"---certainly when you have a pointer, it points to an array of bytes (or rather, a cont

C does not require the presentation of memory as a "giant array of bytes"---certainly when you have a pointer, it points to an array of bytes (or rather, a contiguous array of items of the pointer type) but that's about it. The stack does not have to start high and grown down (in fact, the Linux man page for clone() states that the stack on the HP PA architecture grows upward) and the heap doesn't necessarily start low and grow up (mmap() for instance). You are also confusing multitasking/multiprocessing with C. C has no such concept (well, C11 might, I haven't looked fully into it) and on some systems (like plenty of systems in the 80s) only one program runs at a time. The fact that two "programs" both have a pointer to 0x3A4B7E that reference two physically different locations in memory is an operating system abstraction, not a C abstraction.