> Are we talking about the same language here? The language where arrays implicitly decay to pointers, where integer types get implicitly promoted all over the place, where aliasing rules implicitly define which pointers can and cannot alias, where partial initialization of a struct or array implicitly sets the other members to 0? Where the language will let you call an undeclared function and make up a prototype on the fly for you?

-Wall -Wextra and those issues are made clear to you. But granted, that's part of a good compiler and not part of the language.

> I also don't understand your C++ example, without side-effect why would both invocations of f() within the same scope produce a different result? I thought you wanted to criticise function overloading but you call it with an int both times so I don't see what's you're getting at.

I'm not criticizing function overloading.

> Or maybe you meant that the two calls are in a different scope and could resolve to a different function? But you can do that in C as well in two different translation units and making two static f() implementations.

Yes the two functions are different, but not necessarily in scope, they don't necessarily need to have the same names. Yet at the calling site they look exactly the same: one will modify your data without you being aware of it and the other will not, and there is no syntactic hint to differentiate them.