[astrange]

Meant to say you can't implement it as an invalid/trap state. This is possible in some implementations but they have to cooperate with you to do it.

> In particular getting valid addresses to other objects from out-of-bounds address arithmetic is not just conformant with the C standard but by far the most common conforming behavior.

One reason calculating out of bounds addresses might not work out is the calculation might cause the pointer to overflow, and then surprising things might happen like comparisons failing or tag bits in the high bytes getting corrupted.

[kragen]

Oh, then I agree. My apologies for interpreting you as saying something so obviously incorrect. Yes, in particular CHERI has a mechanism to shrink the bounds of a pointer, but just returning a pointer into an array won't do it.