Comment by pwg

> This completely ignores the situation on the ground when C was developed.

A great many of those replying are many years short of having experienced anything like "the situation on the ground when C was developed". They simply have never known a day without hundreds of gigabytes or more of disk storage and 8G or more of RAM available for user processes after the OS consumes what it needs for its own work. They are "ignoring" because they simply have no basis for understanding.