Undefined behavior is unbounded in both space and time in terms of program semantics, that is, a program that will engender undefined behavior may do so at any

Undefined behavior is unbounded in both space and time in terms of program semantics, that is, a program that will engender undefined behavior may do so at any point during the course of program execution (unbounded in time) as well as may be observed within any memory region (unbounded in space). A colloquial way of saying this is that a compiler is free to do anything it wants anytime it wants in the presence of undefined behavior. Unspecified behavior is bounded both in space and time. Unspecified behavior may only affect program semantics within the statement in which it is engendered and may only be observed within the region of memory that is written to or read from. It is often said that undefined behavior is invalid, and one can sympathize with that statement as it's commonly repeated, but it's not true. All the standard says about undefined behavior is that the standard imposes no requirements about program behavior, it does not state that the program is invalid or that the program must behave in some kind of invalid manner. Almost all non-trivial C++ programs engender undefined behavior in a manner documented by the compiler and do so in a safe and principled way.