Hello everyone,

Can over running of array lead to the catastrophic failures? The answer to this is may be YES I think.

Then why does not C++ provide bound checking on array operations and who is responsible to prevent array overruns?

If by "catastrophic failures" you mean something like program crashing or programs giving wrong answers or programs doing just about anything, then the answer is, indeed, "yes." The technical term is "undefined behavior."

I believe that the designer of the language wanted a simple powerful language (somewhat higher-level than assembly language, but still simple) that could be used to write operating systems. The run-time overhead of checking for out-of-bounds array references (or any other kind of reference to invalid memory addresses) was considered too expensive in terms of program CPU usage (running time) and memory use efficiency. Therefore, such niceties were not built into the language.

(Maybe someone else has some more meaningful insight into this. I would be interested in other opinions.)

The program designer and coder is (are) responsible for implementing programs that can not indulge in undefined behavior.

Regards,

Dave

Dave is correct: See the 2nd bulleted item (the short response -- basically what dave said) here. (a FAQ response by the creator of C++ [Stroustrup])

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