Re: basic VRP min/max range overflow question

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Paul Schlie:

> So in effect the standard committee have chosen to allow any program which
> invokes any undefined behavior to behave arbitrarily without diagnosis?
>
> This is a good thing?

It's the way things are.  There isn't a real market for
bounds-checking C compilers, for example, which offer well-defined
semantics even for completely botched pointer arithmetic and pointer
dereference.

C isn't a programming language which protects its own abstractions
(unlike Java, or certain Ada or Common Lisp subsets), and C never was
intended to work this way.  Consequently, the committee was right to
deal with undefined behavior in the way it did.  Otherwise, the
industry would have adopted C as we know it, and the ISO C standard
would have had the same relevance as, say, the ISO Pascal on the
evolution of Pascal.

Keep in mind that the interest in "safe" langauges (which protect
their abstractions) for commercial production code is a very, very
recent development, and I'm not sure if this is just an accident.