Top Ten, 15 of 10

When we last left our hero, we were looking at ten ways to get screwed by the "C" programming language. Today's entry is Utterly unsafe arrays.

There are uncountably many ways to walk off of the end of an array in C. And, there are only two ends of an array. C happily allows you to walk off either end with undefined results.

The reason this is true is that C is a systems language, written by systems people for building systems. By systems, it is understood that it is meant operating systems - the bits that control everything on the machine. While operating systems have been written in other languages, assembly, Lisp, Pascal, and so on, few have been as sucessful for this task as C. C was designed as a replacement for assembly language. It adds portability and some expression. But, as much as possible, it does not subtract anything. That seems to have been the goal, anyway. In practice, it doesn't subtract much. As a system's programmer, i have to say that i like C. You'll have to pry my unsafe arrays from my cold dead fingers.

What possible use do they have? I have actually used (and it worked), code like this:

    a = b[-4];