[geofft]

Those performance and strategy differences only exist inside C or other high-level languages, as a result of abstractions created by those languages. They are not in any way reflective of "the computer."

By all means it's certainly a valuable abstraction, one that most high-level languages support. But that's like how functions are a valuable abstraction, or objects, or key-value stores, or Berkeley sockets. Learning those abstractions is absolutely important and also completely irrelevant to understanding "the computer".

(As Dijkstra once said, computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Learning C is valuable for computer science, but that doesn't mean it gives you a deep understanding of the computer itself.)

[arcticbull]

You are more than welcome to use a stack in an assembly language too. What you say certainly can be true, but many architectures include dedicated stack pointer registers and operations to manipulate them, either special-purpose (AVR, __SP_H__ and __SP_L__, push, pop) or more generic (x86 %sp, push, pop). I'd argue that functions exist at the hardware level to some extent too in architectures that support, for instance, link registers (PPC $LR) and special instructions (call, ret instead of a generic jump family). Calling conventions, sure, are an attraction over functions.