[arcticbull]

I'd argue that given special purpose registers exist on most platforms to support a stack, and instructions dedicated to manipulating them (x86 %sp, push, pop) that the stack is in fact a hardware concept. The heap, however, is left as an exercise to the reader.

[lmm]

> I'd argue that given special purpose registers exist on most platforms to support a stack, and instructions dedicated to manipulating them (x86 %sp, push, pop) that the stack is in fact a hardware concept.

True enough; however sometimes access to "the heap" (in C terms) will use those instructions, and sometimes access to "the stack" will not. Learning one or two assembly languages is well worth doing, since they offer a coherent abstraction that is genuinely relevant to the implementation of higher-level languages. Not so C.