> You could also imagine a CPU that does not support general pointer arithmetic or which has some form of built-in array bounds checks, which would all be fine if supporting C were not a requirement.
I am happy to correct you, C does not require that. But also, array bounds checks are not a thing that you can implement physically. There is not necessarily corresponding only a single array length to any given address.
Imagine a virtual machine that just allocates a chunk of ram using malloc to provide virtual memory to the emulated machine. Now add another level of memory management on top.
Or imagime a function tha gets just a subrange of an array, for example to search an element therein. But the actual "array" might be much larger. It might be unclear even to the compiler how large the array is!
I am happy to correct you, C does not require that. But also, array bounds checks are not a thing that you can implement physically. There is not necessarily corresponding only a single array length to any given address.
Imagine a virtual machine that just allocates a chunk of ram using malloc to provide virtual memory to the emulated machine. Now add another level of memory management on top.
Or imagime a function tha gets just a subrange of an array, for example to search an element therein. But the actual "array" might be much larger. It might be unclear even to the compiler how large the array is!