alt Hacker NewsGood article.
C would probably not have survived unless it had this flexibility.
But its not justa historical thing. Today there are modern platforms like DSPs that have 32bit sized char, because that is the smallest addressable type. These platforms depend on C for tool chains, even if most "portable" C wont run correctly on them. The fact that you can build hardware like that, and not have to invent a new language / dialect to program them is a huge win for the world.
<edit> I didnt see the footnote about DSPs at first read </edit>
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Not sure why you would need to invent an new programming language when we're still strictly talking about data types. You just introduce a new data type for the hardware if that's what's necessary. You don't need a whole language.
This is why I think so many C developers have no clue what they are doing. They just take whatever decision was made in C as gospel instead of thinking of everything being up for negotiation.
This kind of flexibility is a purely historical thing.
On modern computers, it is impossible to write correct C programs that are agnostic about the true size in bits of the "flexible" types char, short, int, long and long long.
If your program must depend on assumptions about the size in bits of the integer types, those assumptions must be made explicit, by using types like int16_t, int32_t etc.
Writing correct programs that are agnostic about the integer sizes is possible only in programming languages that allow the programmer to install an integer overflow handler even if the CPU does not generate a hardware exception for that, in which case the compiler must insert appropriate overflow checking instructions that would invoke the installed handler when necessary.
This problem did not exist on old computers, where there were hardware exceptions for integer overflows, so even in C you could install a signal handler for SIGFPE, which would also be invoked by integer overflows.