Bounds Checking - Index Checking

Index Checking

Index checking means that, in all expressions indexing an array, first check the index value against the bounds of the array which were established when the array was defined, and should an index be out of bounds, further execution is suspended via some sort of error.

Pascal, Fortran, Java have index checking ability. The VAX computer has an INDEX assembly instruction for array index checking which takes six operands, all of which can use any VAX addressing mode. The B6500 and similar Burroughs computers performed bound checking via hardware, irrespective of which computer language had been compiled to produce the machine code.