Yes, but in practice, that's what people do: write in a language more powerful than the standard gives them. You kind of have to if you want to get anything do

Yes, but in practice, that's what people do: write in a language more powerful than the standard gives them. You kind of have to if you want to get anything done without driving yourself crazy. For example: long mega_byte = 1024 * 1024 * 8; // bits per MB long mega_bit = 1000 * 1000; // bits per megabit If you follow the C90 standard, this code has all sorts of issues. First, // comments are not allowed. Second, identifiers are only guaranteed to have six significant characters, so the above two variables might actually be the same variable. Finally, ints are only guaranteed to be 2 bytes, so the multiplication may overflow and the program is undefined. (Assigning to longs doesn't help: the multiplication already happened.)