>but provably always within the memory bounds That doesn't tell the whole story in C code, though. Out-of-bounds access is UB, thus the whole branch could be a

>but provably always within the memory bounds That doesn't tell the whole story in C code, though. Out-of-bounds access is UB, thus the whole branch could be assumed to be never taken and optimized out by an enterprising compiler. In this case it will only cause missing characters in console output, but "will at worst cause a crash" is not entirely true.