[makomk]

ANSI C didn't really do anything wrong here, though - they created a least-common-denominator spec of what you could reasonably expect from C across all platforms. Pointer arithmetic on NULL pointers had to be considered undefined (not just unspecified) in ANSI C, because on certain commercially-important proprietary systems it generated a hardware trap that caused the OS to kill your process. The problem is that the gcc developers insisted on actually making that code behave as undefined even though it didn't make sense to.

Also, I should note that a lot of code - particularly the Linux kernel - isn't actually using ANSI C anyway. They're using a superset of it with gcc extensions and they have a whole bunch of architecture-specific code too.