Just nitpicking, but in real mode it is at least conceivable to implement arbitrary pointer arithmetic (at some significant performance hit) because segments are spaced evenly every 16 bytes.
The real killer is arbitrary segmentation, where software can say this segment start here and that segment starts there, like, say, the x86 protected mode. Is the OS going to expose absolute segment addresses to the C language to allow some "defensive programming" like checking if a pointer really points to the array you think it does? Hell no, you write your damn code correctly ;)
The real killer is arbitrary segmentation, where software can say this segment start here and that segment starts there, like, say, the x86 protected mode. Is the OS going to expose absolute segment addresses to the C language to allow some "defensive programming" like checking if a pointer really points to the array you think it does? Hell no, you write your damn code correctly ;)