I want to be clear here because I think you might have read that as less precisely worded than I intended.

When I say "my program means what I say", that means the code that is written has some precise meaning that can be faithfully translated into execution (sans hardware/runtime/toolchain bugs).

This is different than "I said what I mean". If you write different code, that may violate expectations and create a bug, but it will still be faithfully translated as written.

Safe Rust attempts to guarantee this with the absence of UB. The definition rust uses still isn't a universal definition, which we agree on. That's why my comment didn't actually talk about Rust. The definition I used should be valid no matter what particular guarantees you choose.

    Things being manually managed doesn't make them gibberish, and something being implicit, rather than explicit, doesn't mean its gibberish.

I completely agree. I like C, for what it's worth.

Where we disagree is that I'm saying this doesn't scale. A large enough program (for a surprisingly small definition of large) will always have gaps and mistakes that violate your chosen definition of safety, and those bits are the gibberish I'm talking about.