So I understand what a stack overflow is, when memory collides (and the title of this website) but what I do not understand is why new entries to the stack are in a decremental memory address. Why are they not in a random memory address, would it not make more sense so that memory collision is not an issue? I am guessing there is some sort of optimizing reason behind that?
** EDIT **
What I did not realize is a stack is given x amount of address space. Makes sense now but brings me to a follow-up question. Can I explicitly state how much memory I want to allocate to a stack?
"Memory collides" would better suit the term of "buffer overflow", where you write outside of the predestined space, but where it is likely to be within a different allocated memory block.
A stack overflow is not about writing outside of one's memory allocation into another memory allocation. It's just about writing outside of one's stack memory allocation. Most likely outside of the stack there's a guard memory page, that is not allocated for anything and which causes a fault on a read or write attempt.
And assigning a random address for each value pushed on the stack makes it hard to find data on the stack (and it's not a stack anymore). When the compiler or programmer knows that subsequent elements occupy subsequent addresses, then it's easy to compute those addresses just from the base pointer of the stack frame.