🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, I am posting this after having cursed the "flexibility" of the C
language many times. I spend a significant fraction of all the time I
do program development on debugging errors which are caused by
reading/writing beyond the borders of arrays and other data
structures. There are many things I like about C, but I loathe the
"possibility" to go beyond declared array borders, and that WITHOUT A
WARNING.

Of course there are cases in which you may want to do that. It would
also probably be inefficient to check each time you follow a pointer
or array index whether this pointer is in the declared part of the
data structure.  Thing is, I don't care!  It sure is very inefficient
if _I_ spend three days tracking down an error due to a wrong array
index, and I would rather have the machine spend a few minutes on
this!

My point is that it would be just wonderful if one had the possibility
to check for this, even if the compilation or execution becomes very
inefficient, and have this as an option that one can switch on and
off. 

So my question is: is there any possibility to do this? Maybe a
compiler option I overlooked (I doubt it, though, I believe I checked
that quite carefully)? Any help very much appreciated!

--Ernst


-- 
Ernst Niebur                              Phone (818)395 2880
Computation and Neural Systems            Fax   (818)796 8876
Caltech 139-74                            ernst@caltech.edu
Pasadena, CA 91125, USA                   ernst@caltech.bitnet