Dennis is correct about there being timebombs, but the problem was the timebombs were already planted, by him and his colleagues. X3J11 codified them via the "U

Dennis is correct about there being timebombs, but the problem was the timebombs were already planted, by him and his colleagues. X3J11 codified them via the "Undefined Behaviour" mechanism, but the alternative isn't to keep K&R C and "not have" undefined behaviour, you just leave a gaping hole in the language. Foundationally C is unsound. For its purpose this made real sense - who cares about soundness, we need to ship Unix ASAP? But with unsound foundations nothing built upon them can be sound itself. ANSI and eventually ISO C finds a way to write the unsound language down formally but doing so doesn't fix it, Mother Nature isn't fooled by words. In places where WG14 declined to write formal language excusing the unsound nonsense (such as provenance rules), there's still unsound nonsense, it's just not written in the ISO document. Again, Mother Nature doesn't care, programs with either kind of unsound nonsense malfunction, the fact that one kind is written down on paper and the other isn't makes no practical difference.