[maxlybbert]

People have been a little sloppy with the terms, but there's a difference between implementation defined behavior and undefined behavior. Generally, the committee allows undefined behavior when it doesn't believe a compiler can detect a bug cheaply.

Of course, many programmers complain about how the committee defines "cheaply." Trying to access an invalid array index is undefined because the way to prevent that kind of bug would be to add range checking to every array access. So, each extra check isn't expensive, but the committee decided that requiring a check on every array access would be too expensive overall. The same applies to automatically detecting NULL pointers.

And the fact that the standard doesn't require a lot -- a C program might not have an operating system underneath it, or might be compiled for a CPU that doesn't offer memory protection -- means that the committee's idea of "expensive" isn't necessarily based on whatever platforms you're familiar with.

But it is certainly true that a compiler can add the checks, or can declare that it will generate code that acts reliably even though the standard doesn't require it. And it's even true that compilers often have command line switches specifically for that purpose. But in general I believe those switches make things worse: your program isn't actually portable to other compilers, and when somebody tries to run your code through a different compiler, there's a very good chance they won't get any warnings that the binary won't act as expected.