My point was indeed, that if you don't use pointer arithmetic in C, that means that you don't use arrays. I mean when you declare arrays of a fixed size, you can also declare an equivalent number of primitive variables instead, but I would find that inconvenient. Hence the question.
If I remember correctly, he meant that only array accesses are used, because their length can be checked (as all arrays have a static length due to no dynamic memory).
Indeed, this is what many people do. But even if you use dynamic memory, if you replace pointer arithmetic by array indexing, you get bounds checking. And in C this also works for arrays of run-time length.
But can't I put any pointer arithmetic in array brackets, so it wouldn't limit anything?