Hacker News Reader

Deeper than that! Such fundamentals as 'the stack is accessible by code' goes back to Fortran. C doesn't need that. The call stack and the 'display' stack could be different things and no C programmer need care.

This is the root of attacks that rewrite the return address of a kernel call. If the return address were managed/protected outside normal data operation this would not exist.

View on HN

Could you explain this in more detail, please? Fortran standards didn't support recursion until Fortran '90 and it wasn't easy to get stack allocation in F'77 compilers from vendors until the mid-80's or so, both long after Algol-like languages had them.

Wondering if they meant Forth rather than Fortran.

It's even less true for Forth, given that it has separate data and return address stacks, and neither is addressable. There is some dedicated Forth hardware that relies on this fact to separate the stacks physically in hardware and e.g. use SRAM for them.

Fortran programmers abused the stack in astonishing ways. They used to calculate offsets on the stack to variables in the previous frame you already returned from. The details of stack layout were coded into important applications. Intel designers tried to do better, but the Fortran people pushed back, hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com