Which other popular language more accurately represents a random access machine of fixed word length?
But then again, you booby trapped the question with popular language.
C does not have an infinite number of libraries and examples. The number of libraries and examples C has is quite large, and there are an infinite number of theoretically possible libraries and examples, but the number of libraries and examples that exist are finite.
So which of these languages do you think is a better representation of hardware and not a PDP-11?
None of them, you use Assembly if you want the better representation of hardware.
Yes, I am quite confident, because I have been dispelling the C myth of the true and only systems programming language since the 1990's.
For one, would expect that a low level language wouldn't be so completely worthless at bit twiddling. Another thing, if C is so low level, why can't I define a new calling convention optimized for my use case? Why doesn't C have a rich library for working with SIMD types that has been ubiquitous in processors for 25 years?
Otherwise is says, do whatever you feel like.
What's standardized was never as important in C land, at least traditionally, which I guess partly explains why it's trailing so far behind. But the stability of the language is also one of its features.
But sure, if all youre doing is dot products I guess you can write a standard function that will work on most simd platforms, but who cares, use a linalg library instead.
Which language more accurately represents hardware then?
The real answer is obviously Assembly - pick a random instruction from any random modern CPU and I'd wager there's a 95% chance it's something you can't express in C at all. If the goal is to model hardware (it's not), it's doing a terrible job.