 This lack of core primitives can be very painful when you have to write a snippet of code even for the simplest machine instruction operation but on the other hand it gives you great flexibility in implementing esoteric abstract primitives acting on exotic abstract objects (the 'machine word' in CDL is more like 'unit of data storage', with no reference to the kind of data stored there).Additionally large projects made use of carefully crafted libraries of primitives.These were then replicated for each target architecture and OS allowing the production of highly efficient code for all.