Can C be safe?

Is it possible to achieve a safer software in C by limiting its use? As the C programming language still is very much alive, especially within the embedded and real-time community much effort has been put into the development of such standards. There are many well known problems in the ANSI/ISO C language specification with or without measurements of fault statistics. And there also exists several controversy's about some constructs – such as the use of the goto statement. Another important topic is the security of systems. Buffer overflow exploits is one of the most common security vulnerabilities for software written in C. There are several approaches with varying success to find these faults; for an example on-line memory management (e.g. garbage collection) or off-line static analysis. This paper focuses on the field in general and will take a closer look on a few specifications that are software safety related.