No bounds checking for dynamic arrays at compile time?

[SomeDude]

On Thursday, 13 December 2012 at 04:11:10 UTC, Pacoup wrote:
> I've been newly exploring D for a very short while now, and, 
> exploring Array functionality, I came upon this funny bit of 
> code off of a badly written tutorial.
>
> import std.stdio;
>
> void main()
> {
>    int[] intArray;
> 	
>    intArray[0] = 42;
>    intArray[1] = 54;
>    intArray[2] = 91;
>
>    writefln("The length of intArray is %d.", intArray.length);
> }
>
> This compiles, believe it or not, and doesn't throw any errors 
> or warnings whatsoever, but obviously for people who know D, 
> this will throw a core.exception.RangeError: Range violation 
> when run.
>
> Why? Because Dynamic Arrays in D are not dynamic 
> à-la-JavaScript, they can just be resized. The missing line 
> comes directly after the array declaration:
>
> intArray.length = 3;
>
> Now, given that doing int[] myArray initializes a dynamic array 
> with length 0, why is there no bounds checking on this? Why is 
> the compiler not even throwing a warning telling me the dynamic 
> array's length has not been initialized or that I'm trying to 
> access data which is potentially out of bounds?
>
> Static arrays throw out of bounds errors on compilation when 
> there's a mismatch, but why not dynamic arrays?
>
> I thought D was supposed to be a language allowing safer 
> programming than C. This isn't very convincing for such an 
> elementary feature of the language.

I guess the author of the tutorial should be made aware of his 
mistake, before he spreads bad lessons to newcomers.