Whether the data in your application concerns atoms, or mere text, you
have to be careful about the fact that access to a single datum is not
necessarily atomic. This means that it can take more than one
instruction to read or write a single object. In such cases, a signal
handler might be invoked in the middle of reading or writing the object.
There are three ways you can cope with this problem. You can use data
types that are always accessed atomically; you can carefully arrange
that nothing untoward happens if an access is interrupted, or you can
block all signals around any access that had better not be interrupted
(see Blocking Signals).