Okay this is a far more reasonable argument but I'm not convinced it's right. The standard does define normal and abnormal program termination. It also defines <signal.h>. SIGINT addresses the keyboard case (or the implementation can provide another signal). SIGABRT, SIGTERM, etc. are raised upon termination. For the keyboard case, then the program would be made aware, and it can indeed ignore the Ctrl+C request if it desires. That's perfectly normal and nothing absurd. For other types of termination, the other signals are raised. But in this case the program is terminated before any signal is raised at all. Now, as a practical matter I would argue the hosted environment should still be able to kill the program in the face of user request simply because nobody wants a host that's the slave of the program even if it's against the standard, but this is going far, far, far beyond that. It's happening at the request of neither the user nor the program; it's just happening because the host feels like it. Now that's both a violation of the standard and an uncool one at that!

P.S. I don't think indefinite hold is "functionally the same thing" as termination. A caller system(), for one, would need to return in one case, but not the other.