https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/vararray.pdf
It is a culture thing, eventually the authors don't have any last words to say, if they let the community rule the language design, and their voice is equally one vote.
This says it all really. Nothing more needs to be said. Unfortunate.
And by the way,
"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"
Insisting on memory safety back then would be like insisting on code being accompanied by checkable formal proofs of correctness now: It's a technique that can be applied right now and that does improve safety, but it comes at such a cost that the tradeoff only makes sense for a handful of niche applications (aerospace, automotive, medical devices).
Tell me how bounds checks on array accesses would have prevented that.
Got anything relevant?