Exactly Thus you are protecting the function and not the variable. Somehow you don't care that one actually has to READ the variable somewhere.
Ok, I know that, and I am not going to fall into a dispute about it (just wanted to be sure I understand you right). However, sometimes (rarely) it is not needed to read anything: that was just a theoretic sample, it could be protection for writing a log when you don't like text from different functions to be mixed or adding/removing thread from the list when you simply don't use that list anywhere else or some kind of a wrapper for not reenterant function.

Thank you for paying me attention, Master of Zen