From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!zehntel!sytek!menlo70!hao!hplabs!hpda!fortune!megatest!sun!gnu Newsgroups: net.lang.c Title: Re: C pet peeve Article-I.D.: sun.223 Posted: Sun Mar 20 21:03:32 1983 Received: Thu Mar 24 08:02:32 1983 References: linus.16441 unc.4794 Clearly if this person is writing programs with subscripts it's not "really" written in C. Real C programmers always use pointers, which can't be checked without immense overhead or super intelligence in the compilation environment. (Since by definition a subscription is equivalent to a pointer add then dereference, it's not clear to me that you could check subscripting without checking pointers without violating the language definition.) I can see it now -- programs written with *(p+i) in places where it is known that subscript checking would fail, or in inner loops where speed is important. ("Daddy, why didn't he just write p[i]?" "Obscure historical reasons, Susie." "But Daddy, the program stops working when I change it...") John Gilmore, Sun Microsystems