At least they
have gotten past the Apple II days when the keyboard was missing
characters that are part of the C language.
such as which ones?

~ iirc. I'm not sure about ^.

Back in the Apple II day you did a lot more bit twiddling. I think there
were either software or hardware workarounds but I remember a friend
complaining about it as well as the gymnastics to get lowercase.

I went the CP/M route with the BDS C subset compiler. It was a different
world and I never had an Apple II or worked with the 6502. I was in the
Intel/Zilog camp. I really liked the 68000 when it came along rather
than Intel's kludge but nobody was paying me to write for Apple or 68000.