Two Birds with One Stone

[VLD/VMB]

Yes, VAX-like machines are simpler to program, especially at
the assembly language level (except for having to remember
the large instruction set).  But it is not much harder to
write C code that would port to your hypothetical example
machine (19-bit shorts, base 3, etc.) than it is to write
it for a VAX.  Why limit the future portability of your
code unnecessarily?  Who knows, someday you may have to
use one of the weird machines, and instead of cursing how
brain-damaged it is you could instead be happy how you
provided portability for your code the day you wrote it.

In particular, people who think ints and pointers should be
the same size are ruling out a lot of possibly nice machine
architectures.  Use C data types by the rules and you seldom
have to worry about the whole issue.