Pointer peril

Use of pointers in the C programming language is subject to a number of constraints, violation of which results in the dreaded undefined behaviour. If a situation with undefined behaviour occurs, anything is permitted to happen. The program may produce unexpected results, crash, or demons may fly out of the user’s nose.

Some of these rules concern pointer arithmetic, addition and subtraction in which one or both operands are pointers. The C99 specification spells it out in section 6.5.6:

When an expression that has integer type is added to or subtracted from a pointer, the result has the type of the pointer operand. […] If both the pointer operand and the result point to elements of the same array object, or one past the last element of the array object, the evaluation shall not produce an overflow; otherwise, the behavior is undefined. […]

When two pointers are subtracted, both shall point to elements of the same array object, or one past the last element of the array object; the result is the difference of the subscripts of the two array elements.

In simpler, if less accurate, terms, operands and results of pointer arithmetic must be within the same array object. If not, anything can happen.
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