This never, ever bit me in the Pascal days. I suspect this was primarily because the stack I was using was either "provided by the Borland Pascal standard libr

This never, ever bit me in the Pascal days. I suspect this was primarily because the stack I was using was either "provided by the Borland Pascal standard library" pieces, or it was my own Pascal or assembler code. I had a limited number of calls into a library and a need to do a few things that escape me with regard to interacting with -- I think -- an 16550 UART[0] and its driver, but I don't recall them being particularly nasty to deal with. I mean, all things relative -- I was expecting these to be nasty to deal with because they often involved inline assembler, so the problem of "making it behave with the string" wasn't quite as pressing as "what the hell am I actually doing here?" :) [0] My huge project was a bulletin board system in the 90s.