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> "To a large extent, the answer is: C is that way because reality is that way.

I thought C was so widespread that it eventually started to affect how some computer architectures were designed? If so it seems a bit disingenuous to say that it is only dealing with the reality that it was given.

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The original machine that influenced C's model of computers was the PDP-11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11). It had a mov instruction instead of load/store. It had no dedicated IO instructions. It could be treated as a sort of generic random access machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_machine) and that is what C did and still does. So there was a reality that C simply modeled, and it was copied (with all sorts of modifications) many times.

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