[jcelerier]

> This is usually not what you want.

very interesting comment considering I'm literally fighting with stupid languages with this kind of permissive rules right now, which definitely just create more bugs (for instance silently dropped values because an upstream API changed, added an element at the end of the list, you updated but since you get no error you now have to go through all the calls to check them one-by-one)

[mananaysiempre]

Remember, in C you cannot use anything but a literal constant for the array size. My reference for how useful strict array-size matching can be under such circumstances is standard Pascal (as opposed to Modula-ish Pascals like Borland’s), and the answer there is that it more or less isn’t. Even in C, I’d expect at least some people would actually use things like int(*array)[5], given this syntax is valid even in C89, but in function signatures I’ve literally never encountered it.

If the size could a (type-level) variable, that would be a very different proposition. But variables lead to expressions, expressions lead to functions, functions lead to suffering^W becoming a full-fledged dependently typed programming language—if not an Agda or an Idris then at least an ATS[1]. I’d welcome that, but as far as I can see the ergonomics are very much not there yet for any kind of low-level programming.

[1] https://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/

[jcelerier]

> If the size could a (type-level) variable, that would be a very different proposition. But variables lead to expressions, expressions lead to functions, functions lead to suffering^W becoming a full-fledged dependently typed programming language

I mean, that's just plain old C++. You could have compile-time expressions operating on compile-time numbers since the 90s ; it's a widely-used feature.