[COFF] [TUHS] C vs Pascal thoughts - was Buffer overflow found/fixed in v4 tape ; )

[segaloco via COFF]

On Tuesday, January 6th, 2026 at 09:42, Bakul Shah via COFF <coff at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 
> Personally I would define a "shared" attribute and allow shared globals -- the idea being any access to shared variables is protected via mutexes --
>

Like all things, this sounds great as long as I can turn it off when I
know, by definition, collisions shouldn't happen.  Otherwise I'm
potentially avoiding a race condition (good!) in code that by definition
should not be capable of a race condition (bad!), side-stepping the root
cause entirely.  I should fix that, not my compiler/language.

Those are the kinds of things that do keep me up at night with all the
"hand-holding" in modern programming systems.  Sure, it'll keep me from
invalid access without having to pay it much mind, but I *want* to pay
my invalid accesses some mind to tighten up my algorithm, not just hope
the language fixes it in post.

- Matt G.