Comment by HelloNurse

While, for the purpose of avoiding gratuitous mistakes, C is a serious disadvantage compared to less low-level languages, your discussion of UB pitfalls in C is aimed at a strawman.

First of all, traffic rules are good, and similar to good C programming rules: check number value ranges when there is a chance of casting or overflow, check Inf and NaN floating point values, declare alignment strategically (e.g. in all memory allocations) to avoid misaligned pointers and variables, and so on. Such rules have alternatives and exceptions and must not be part of the language.

Second, nobody needs perfection and "UB-freeness": it is reasonable to assume that many cases of UB won't be a problem, either because a library will be used correctly and they won't happen, or because the C implementation is neither weird nor hostile and they will be as benign as defined or implementation defined behaviour, or simply because we avoid doing something known to be inexact or hard to write correctly.

Practical programming requires knowing the relevant rules for what one is doing and learning new ones by making, diagnosing and overcoming mistakes; not omniscience, and definitely not the unfounded feeling of omniscience and unlimited resources that LLMs can give.

EDIT: I insist on the signed char example because it would be terribly wrong (processing who-knows-what as if it were a sequence of characters) even without undefined behaviour, even in different languages.