What is the output of this program?

int main()
{
    int array[] = {1,2,3};
    cout << array[3] << endl;
}

Answer: Noone knows!

What is the output of this program?

void f(int i, int j){}

int foo()
{
    cout << "foo ";
    return 42;
}

int bar()
{
    cout << "bar ";
    return 42;
}

int main()
{
    f(foo(), bar());
}

Answer: Noone knows!

There is a difference in the severity of uncertainty though. The first case results in undefined behaviour (because we are indexing outside of the array), whereas the second results in unspecified behaviour (because we don’t know the order in which the function arguments will be evaluated). What is the difference?

In the case of undefined behaviour, we are screwed. Anything can happen, from what you thought should happen, to the program sending threatening letters to your neighbour’s cat. Probably it will read the memory right after where the array is stored, interpret whatever garbage is there and print it, but there is no way to know this.

In the case of unspecified behaviour however, we are probably OK. The implementation is allowed to choose from a set of well-defined behaviours. In our case, there are two possibilities, calling foo() then bar(), or bar() then foo(). Note that if foo() and bar() have some side-effects that we rely on being executed in a specific order, this unspecified behaviour would still mean we have a bug in our code.

To summarize, never write code that results in undefined behaviour, and never write code that relies on unspecified behaviour.

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