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

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 12:08 PM Paul Winalski via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> The problem with that philosophy is that a buffer overflow doesn't
> necessarily lead to a program crash.  A program crash is the lucky
> outcome.  If you're unlucky you will silently get the wrong answer, or
> other misbehavior.
>
Right - which is why it took something catastrophic like the Morris Worm
and shortly thereafter, the infamous smash the stack paper: (
https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa08/papers/stack_smashing.pdf) for
people to wake up to the fact that it really was an issue for many
programs.

I recall that some of the language folks (particularly those heavily
involved in the Pascal *vs.* C war) like to say things like: *"See, the
compiler should have general bounds-checking code."  *I can't say I agreed
on the general topic (there were too many things Pascal got wrong), but
note that today both Go and Rust provide automatic bounds checking for all
array and slice accesses at runtime.