> If we specified formally and super rigorously that a pointer is an integer and that memory is an array of bytes, we could have a UB-free language That's PVI

> If we specified formally and super rigorously that a pointer is an integer and that memory is an array of bytes, we could have a UB-free language That's PVI (Provenance Via Integers) and it's a performance disaster. If anything in memory might be pointed to, almost all the nice modern optimisations aren't correct. It is really popular with a certain kind of "Portable assembler" programmer, who typically has no idea how the machine actually works, nor how their language is defined but is very confident the nonsense they're writing ought to do what they wanted it to do. So, the "bad" news is that you can't have this, your compiler vendor won't make it, and the "good" news is that you'd have hated it anyway which is why they won't make it.