What was the scenario? I had a couple of small, fixed-size char buffers and I wanted to swap their valid portions, but the obvious choice of swap_ranges(a, b, a + max(na, nb)) would run into this issue. (n.b. this wouldn't be correct for non-POD types anyway, but we're talking about chars.)

On top of it being annoying to not be able to do the convenient thing, it made life harder when debugging, because the "correct" solution does not preservs the bit patterns (0xCC/0xCD or whatever) that the debug build injects into uninitialized arrays, therefore making it harder to tell when I later read an uninitialized element from a swapped-from array.