I want this to crash, but it doesn't

Question

seriously.. I\'m an old hacker from the 80\'s and with some spare time on my hands thought I\'d \'C\' what the fuss is about

( my background is Forth, which does thi

Answer 1

C doesn't do any bounds checking. (Forth doesn't either, so I'm not sure where the expectation came from.)

Overflowing an array is undefined behavior: it is allowed, but not required, to crash. In this case, the bytes just happen to be in the same virtual memory page as the stack frame where the local variable was placed. If the frame were towards the end of the page, the CPU would recognize a bad address and complain about the overflow.

If you go a few kilobytes or megabytes out, you will likely see something like you expect.