Here's the relevant passage from that discussion:
I can understand the benefit of an architecture with fine-grained access control to memory. Yes, I absolutely can. But this is still ridiculous. What harm is there in POSSESSING a pointer which points out of bounds? If the architecture really is capable of fine-grained access control, then attempting to use this pointer will result in a fault ANYWAY. This is a completely arbitrary restriction that gives no real benefit whatsoever, while disallowing lots of completely reasonable code.The Rationale says the Committee considered defining
the effects at both ends (bilateral dispensations?), but
rejected it for efficiency reasons. Consider an array of
large elements -- structs of 32KB size, say. A system
that actually performed hardware checking of pointer values
could accommodate the one-past-the-end rule by allocating
just one extra byte after the end of the array, a byte that
the special pointer value could point at without setting off
the hardware's alarms. But one-before-the-beginning would
require an extra 32KB, just to hold data that could never
be used ...
And get this: the standard specifically ALLOWS an uninitialized pointer. So somehow, you're going to have to tell the bounds-checking hardware "Hey, ignore this one particular pointer -- it's okay according to the C standard." Which of course forces language-specific concerns into the hardware, which is completely idiotic.