Array index out of bound in C

The problem is that C/C++ doesn't actually do any boundary checking with regards to arrays. It depends on the OS to ensure that you are accessing valid memory.

In this particular case, you are declaring a stack based array. Depending upon the particular implementation, accessing outside the bounds of the array will simply access another part of the already allocated stack space (most OS's and threads reserve a certain portion of memory for stack). As long as you just happen to be playing around in the pre-allocated stack space, everything will not crash (note i did not say work).

What's happening on the last line is that you have now accessed beyond the part of memory that is allocated for the stack. As a result you are indexing into a part of memory that is not allocated to your process or is allocated in a read only fashion. The OS sees this and sends a seg fault to the process.

This is one of the reasons that C/C++ is so dangerous when it comes to boundary checking.

The segfault is not an intended action of your C program that would tell you that an index is out of bounds. Rather, it is an unintended consequence of undefined behavior.

In C and C++, if you declare an array like

type name[size];

You are only allowed to access elements with indexes from 0 up to size-1. Anything outside of that range causes undefined behavior. If the index was near the range, most probably you read your own program's memory. If the index was largely out of range, most probably your program will be killed by the operating system. But you can't know, anything can happen.

Why does C allow that? Well, the basic gist of C and C++ is to not provide features if they cost performance. C and C++ has been used for ages for highly performance critical systems. C has been used as a implementation language for kernels and programs where access out of array bounds can be useful to get fast access to objects that lie adjacent in memory. Having the compiler forbid this would be for naught.

Why doesn't it warn about that? Well, you can put warning levels high and hope for the compiler's mercy. This is called quality of implementation (QoI). If some compiler uses open behavior (like, undefined behavior) to do something good, it has a good quality of implementation in that regard.

[js@HOST2 cpp]$ gcc -Wall -O2 main.c
main.c: In function 'main':
main.c:3: warning: array subscript is above array bounds
[js@HOST2 cpp]$

If it instead would format your hard disk upon seeing the array accessed out of bounds - which would be legal for it - the quality of implementation would be rather bad. I enjoyed to read about that stuff in the ANSI C Rationale document.

You generally only get a segmentation fault if you try to access memory your process doesn't own.

What you're seeing in the case of a[11] (and a[10] by the way) is memory that your process does own but doesn't belong to the a[] array. a[25000] is so far from a[], it's probably outside your memory altogether.

Changing a[11] is far more insidious as it silently affects a different variable (or the stack frame which may cause a different segmentation fault when your function returns).