It&#x27;s what they paid me to do in the 90s.  That was a compelling reason to use C.<p>(of course, one employer appropriately used C as a portable assembler, and respected it as such, for the purposes of developing a cross compiler and tool emulations for an older minicomputer environment; the next was doing (batch) &quot;business applications&quot; and foolishly spent too little on hardware and too much wasted effort on application development)<p>Pascal (Modula) did much the same, SAFELY, but the money wasn&#x27;t put into compiler optimization :-(<p>Interesting that the GNU compiler collection now includes a very efficient Ada compiler.