[TUHS] Buffer overflow found/fixed in v4 tape ;)

[Paul Winalski via TUHS]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 10:20 AM Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

>
> Overflowable buffers were common in those days. It was all too easy
> when programming to shrug one's shoulders and opine that nobody would
> ever want to input a 200-character line, say, so why bother writing
> the extra code to catch it? We did gradually learn that automatically
> generated input lines--particularly lines of code--could be much
> longer than any person would write, so buffer overflows that actually
> happened gradually got fixed.
>
> There was another consideration.  Machines in those days were slow and had
tiny memory capacity.  Was it really worth wasting the extra memory space
and CPU time for buffer overflow checking in cases where it was extremely
unlikely to occur?

-Paul W.