"good clean C"

Is there such a thing? It seems like every C program, even ones that are praised as being excellently written, are a mess of pointers, memory management, conditional statements that check for errors, special return value codes, and so forth.

To put it another way, look at the difference between an implementation of a Red/Black Tree in C and one written in Lisp or Haskell. Not only are basic things overly difficult to get right in C, but C does not become any easier as problem sizes scale up; it lacks expressiveness and forces programmers to deal with low-level details regardless of how high-level their program is.