>>52But C started off early with a hard spec
What, son? Early C was whatever the Unix compiler did. C changed a lot over the years before the K&R book and changed more between then and C89 (the first standard). C wasn't standardized when C++ and Objective C were first made.
C89 completely changed the function definition syntax and semantics, what register does, the behavior of multiple structs/unions with the same field name, the preprocessor's substitution semantics, and added void *, const, and a lot more. It also made a lot of things "undefined" when they used to be well-defined because C was expanded to run on platforms and memory models it wasn't originally intended for.