> What ruins this for C is the existence of pointers. Stacks aren't freely relocatable since pointers into the stack could exist.

I sometimes wonder what computing would be like if the 80286 hadn't sucked, if segmentation had won over flat address spaces, and if we'd been able to do relocation pain-free by changing a segment base register in one spot instead of rewriting linear pointers everywhere. We could have done paging within segments.

Oh well.