[wat10000]

I'd say it's more like C was designed from really dumb compilers on really diverse hardware. The standard, at least the early versions of it, was more to codify what was out there than to declare what was correct. For most things like this in the standard, you can point to two pre-standardization compilers that did it differently.

[AnimalMuppet]

Kind of both? There were pre-standard compilers, but when they created the standard, they tried to make it so that one could write really dumb compilers and still fulfill the standard.

[daemin]

I suspect it was also the case that if they didn't make it easy for platform vendors to implement compilers then they wouldn't do it.