"Third, stacks on the Multics processors grew in the positive direction, rather than the negative direction. This meant that if you actually accomplished a buffer overflow, you would be overwriting unused stack frames, rather than your own return pointer, making exploitation much more difficult."
But srsly folks, memory with an origin of zero is a proud tradition that helps confused programmers know where to begin.
And given that within the Von Neumann architecture program and data can not be distinguished, and also noting the incredible utility of a stack to keeping a dynamic call chain with localized storage reference scope to support recursion, a paradigm that divides between a heap and stack in a layout that's as open-ended as possible to the available storage and execution demands of the program seems not only prudent but fairly obvious.
Sure, feel free to inject an arbitrarily complex N-leveled storage abstraction built from pure message passing between caches within some larger, wildly associative machinery and stuff it into the nether regions of the machine. But regardless of such hijinks, as long as your memory is indexed and locally finite, you end up with at least two ends of memory, hither and yon, so may as well use them.
As to turning hither and yon upside down into yon and hither, knock yourself out! Show the world the future of memory should be inverted and palindromic-- introducing Z, the runtime environment where everything can and does start from either end or anywhere in between. No design nor implementation is necessary. Every pattern in memory is a valid program. Just state your objective and start debugging. Voila! Problems that once seemed intractable are solved. Call it VibeZ coding.
