It's not meant to be portable. It's just that C is a low-level, weakly-typed language where everything is bytes and bits, and every pointer may be null at any m

It's not meant to be portable. It's just that C is a low-level, weakly-typed language where everything is bytes and bits, and every pointer may be null at any moment. Disregarding type-safety is OK for C, so it's handy to conflate 0 and false (after all, bools are isomorphic to positive numbers modulus 2). It's these other languages who are in the wrong because any high- or medium-level language must have proper Option and Bool types without null or false infecting every type out there.