C is easy, computers are complex. Sometimes these are confused. Like in this case, the syntax is easy to human-parse, but it's harder to reason about the result of the expression on different architectures and with different compilers, yet the complexity is caused by the computer, not the language.
Quite. I started out in a world of C99, endianness and differing bit packing. My early day to day involved many more unions and a lot more time wondering if SunOS cc was going to behave the same as Dynix or MSC on DOS.
It's easy to forget how much of that mindless preprocessor and make conditionality we've left behind. Sadly in exchange for hardware that's much blander now.
