Yes, you can always pass a pointer and a length explicitly. And that's what the "safe" versions of e.g. string functions do. But it's still incumbent on you a

Yes, you can always pass a pointer and a length explicitly. And that's what the "safe" versions of e.g. string functions do. But it's still incumbent on you as the programmer to use them properly. It would still be beneficial to have a compiler mode where all that was done for you automatically and it was impossible to have a buffer overrun.