I do not imply bad intentions, but I see the arguments brought forward in WG14. It got better in recent years but we had to push back against some rather absurd interpretations of the standard, e.g. that unspecified values can change after they are selected. Your example shows something else, the standard is simply not seemed to be very important. The standard is perfectly clear how pointer comparison works, and yet this is not alone reason enough to invest resources into fixing this if this is not shown to cause actual problems in real code.