"K&R will not tell you anything about target-specifics..."

How in the world could books or standards ever hope to? A compiler's implementation of indirection is always target specific. I've never heard of an idealized K&R virtual machine. Knuth's MIX computer is a different story. Now if K&R, H&S, standards, etc. boiled everything down to the MIX instruction set, we would all have a common reference.