I'm with Fabian, and laugh at the usage of the term "hack". No pun intended.
If that's a hack, and the current implementation may very well be one, then you should really be requesting for "dehacking" it. There is no reason why the [] operator when applied to strings couldn't perform bounds checking in debug mode. The compiler knows very well the type of the expression to which any operator is applied, so what's the problem really? It's applied to a pointer expression, OK let's just access the said memory area. It's applied to a string, OK let's perfoem some bounds checkings.
If that's a hack, and the current implementation may very well be one, then you should really be requesting for "dehacking" it. There is no reason why the [] operator when applied to strings couldn't perform bounds checking in debug mode. The compiler knows very well the type of the expression to which any operator is applied, so what's the problem really? It's applied to a pointer expression, OK let's just access the said memory area. It's applied to a string, OK let's perfoem some bounds checkings.