for my money, this is the best argument here.<p>c memory handling is so painful, and support for higher order functions so limiting, that there really is very little that you can carry across directly from lisp and/or functional programming to c.  on the other hand what you do see, is how much time you are wasting due to c's constraints; something that may help you better allocate your time and/or choose your tools.<p>there are other small wins too.  sometimes knowing the "easy way" to solve a problem you can then work out a compromise in c that gives you some of the benefits without being too hard to implement.  as a result you can end up using realloc much more than other people you work with :o)