[1718627440]

My point was indeed, that if you don't use pointer arithmetic in C, that means that you don't use arrays. I mean when you declare arrays of a fixed size, you can also declare an equivalent number of primitive variables instead, but I would find that inconvenient. Hence the question.

[smj-edison]

If I remember correctly, he meant that only array accesses are used, because their length can be checked (as all arrays have a static length due to no dynamic memory).

[uecker]

Indeed, this is what many people do. But even if you use dynamic memory, if you replace pointer arithmetic by array indexing, you get bounds checking. And in C this also works for arrays of run-time length.

[1718627440]

But can't I put any pointer arithmetic in array brackets, so it wouldn't limit anything?

[uecker]

Whatever index you compute can be checked against a bound.

[1718627440]

2[a*b] What bound?

[uecker]

This does not even compile. For array indexing,

array[expression]

if "array" has a bound whatever expression evaluates to can be checked against the bound of array. If "array" is not a bounded array but a pointer or an unbounded array, then this does not work, but my point is that it is easy to avoid such code.