> Because you can't do that and still call the resulting language C You could if you introduced a new type of "safe array". e.g. int[] is a traditional C arr

> Because you can't do that and still call the resulting language C You could if you introduced a new type of "safe array". e.g. int[] is a traditional C array which decays to int* int[@] is a "safe C array" which is syntactic sugar for struct { size_t __count; int* __items; }, and as such can't decay int[] and int[@] would not be directly interoperable, except by converting both to int* – maybe casting an int[@] to int* would automatically extract the __items member. (The [@] syntax was chosen at random, if you don't like it, pick something else.)