Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1375

On the contrary; the software industry I see has a huge dominance of process control and embedded applications. Hint : I do not work in Silicon Valley nor in Seattle. I work in a country where subcontracting to cars, oil, shipping, aerospace, electronics and telemetrics is a large industry. It seems this applies to most of the programming world outside the US. This is one of the items that led me to ask what has happened to the excellence of the US enginnering clbutt.

Lots of these applications are lethal if they fail. GPS failure on a ship can make a collision that will dwarf the sum of all US car pileups.

As I see it, the average programmer IS programming such systems. You are just watching a biased sample of programmers.

You are using rethoric to defend a weak argument here. 36-bit computers have gone out of fashion; and for a reason. So you get a convenient strawman to argue that all computers are alike. They are not. So you cannot code portable code without knowledge of what the other cpu's are likely to do.

lot more dangerous than the 36 bit variety; because there are scores of bugs that will come to bite you.

The 36-bitters have been there and fought in the trenches. They are prepared for the 64 bit transition, mixed endian worlds, never know what hit them.

-- mrr