The thing is, C does contain quite a bit of "magic" built into the transformations a compiler is allowed to do to your constructs. A mental model of C built on

The thing is, C does contain quite a bit of "magic" built into the transformations a compiler is allowed to do to your constructs. A mental model of C built on the mapping to assembly is appealing, but leads to false intuition when reasoning about the language's rules, which occasionally has disastrous effects. Just as an anecdote, I have seen a surprising number of C programmers assume that the language's type aliasing rules are related to or somehow governed by pointer alignment, when these are entirely separate. The former exists to facilitate analysis and optimization at the compiler level -- there is no "ground" reason. It's important not to get trapped in the portable assembler mindset and lose sight of an entire level of transformations that might not have an intuitive relationship with hardware.