[pjc50]

> specifically the language is deliberately inventing things that cannot be so on hardware

So what? The standard has "undefined behavior"; real implementations always do something, even if that something cannot be determined in advance. The standard is the standard, it's not a machine.

[JonChesterfield]

Well, at some point in history C was about telling a physical machine what to do. You can see that in the operations it exposes.

I don't know what modern C is for. The one that manipulates an abstract machine with concurrency oracles and time travelling metadata on object identifiers. It looks like an aberration derived from C++ to me.

[wbl]

Every compiler for C has always done things like register allocation that make it not assembly.