> C's refusal to specify dynamic memory allocation in the language runtime
> (as opposed to, eventually, the standard library) 

This complaint overlooks one tenet of C: every operation in what you

call "language runtime" takes O(1) time. Dynamic memory allocation

is not such an operation.

Your hobbyhorse awakened one of mine.

malloc was in v7, before the C standard was written. The standard

spinelessly buckled to allow malloc(0) to return 0, as some 

implementations gratuitously did. I can't imagine that any program

ever actually wanted the feature. Now it's one more undefined

behavior that lurks in thousands of programs.

There are two arguments for malloc(0), Most importantly, it caters for

a limiting case for aggregates generated at runtime--an instance of

Kernighan's Law, "Do nothing gracefully". It also provides a way to 

create a distinctive pointer to impart some meta-information, e.g.

"TBD" or "end of subgroup", distinct from the null pointer, which

merely denotes absence.

Doug