my experience in this matter comes from looking at the output from a VMS cross-compiler that generated 68000 assembler in the mid-80's. I imagined that this shortcoming would have been solved since then

I use C99 in my daily job, since about two years. C99 is an improvement over C89 (ANSI C), yes. And it looks like C11 improves even more. (C11 is not supported by our legacy build environment.) But my wish list for a better C standard becomes longer every day. It's hard to use C after using Perl for years. You get used to have a lot of stuff done automatically for you, and being forced to do that manually again is annoying. Especially when you know that the computer could do that for you, if only the compiler and the runtime environment were a little bit smarter.

Alexander