[Luyt]

When I was reading this, I thought "Nooo! Don't make the size of an array part of its type!" That has been rightfully shown as a very bad idea by Brian Kernighan, see http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html Luckily the proposal is about passing a 'fat pointer', really a pointer and a length. I did that often in my C programs too: int process(char *buf, int buflen);

Maybe this fix to C's Biggest Mistake, a.k.a. the 'fat pointer', is just syntactic sugar.

[nimrody]

I don't think Walter suggested having the array size part of the type (static array types).

He suggested using "fat pointers" -- pointers along with their extent. This is similar to how many Pascal compilers treat the type "String".

Kernighan mentions Pascal strings in his article but claims the solution does not scale to other types. Walter's solution does work for all array types (but admittedly has other problems).

[chmike]

Making the size part of the type is a useful feature in some cases. The compiler can benefit from this information to optimize the data structure and its manipulation.

The exponential grow of CPU processing power has led to discard such optimizations in benefit of code simplicity. But hand held devices with limited energy, computing and storage capacity may put it back into perspective.