> the pervasiveness of the C model has fossilized design decisions of the PDP-11
This is tangential and somewhat pedantic, but I want to point out an oft-repeated mischaracterization.
C is essentially a refinement of B with some additions [1], and B was written for the PDP-7, which was a very different machine.
For example, the increment and decrement operators in C were inherited from B; they could not have been modelled after the PDP-11. From Dennis Ritchie himself [2]:
> Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. The PDP-7, however, did have a few "auto-increment" memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own.
Another person puts it this way [3]:
> It's a myth to suggest C's design is based on the PDP-11. People often quote, for example, the increment and decrement operators because they have an analogue in the PDP-11 instruction set. This is, however, a coincidence. Those operators were invented before the language [i.e. B] was ported to the PDP-11.
[1] Notably, the char type, since the PDP-11 was byte addressable but the PDP-7 was not.
[2] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
[3] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8869/have...