Well, the array indices are allowed to be any sorts of integers, and the standard is worded in such a way that such addition must work correctly without overflowing — provided, of course, that the array you're indexing into is large enough. So in practice, you're bounded by the width of size_t.

Oh, and did you know that the width of ptrdiff_t is not required to have any relation to the width of size_t? There is even an explicit provision in standard for the case when subtracting two pointers into the same very large array can't fit into ptrdiff_t:

    When two pointers are subtracted, both shall point to elements of the same array object, or one past
    the last element of the array object; the result is the difference of the subscripts of the two array
    elements. The size of the result is implementation-defined, and its type (a signed integer type) is
    ptrdiff_t defined in the <stddef.h> header. If the result is not representable in an object of that
    type, the behavior is undefined.

So yeah; you should try to work strictly with indices only, they're guaranteed to be correctly addible to pointers no matter the sizes of your arrays.