Re: Recursive Call


In article <HZfcf.64578$zb5.43562@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> Joe Zitzelberger wrote:
>
> > Even the IBM mainframe, originally a non-stack machine, made hardware
> > allowances for stack-style things (e.g. Program Call & Return) somewhere
> > in the 70's.
>
> Program Call and Return was implemented on System 370 architecture
> without hardware or software stacks, to the best of my knowledge. And
> even today, IBM Z-series mainframes still do not have hardware
> stacks, as far as I know.

Even if zSeries doesn't have a "hardware" stack (which I imagine to
mean opcodes for pushing and popping values, and a register which is
either reserved or used by convention as a stack pointer), I believe
Joe's correct that pretty much all general-purpose systems these
days at least provide some stack mechanism as part of their standard
ABI.

That's no doubt due in part to the popularity of C. C can be
implemented without a classic contiguous stack - for example using
chained activation records - but the language treats function calls,
function parameters and return values, and automatic variable
allocation and deallocation in a stack-oriented fashion, so some
relatively efficient stack mechanism is a must for a reasonable C
implementation.

There are no doubt still small embedded systems that do not provide
a stack, but these days even most embedded machines are programmed
in C or another high-level language with similar requirements.

--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Do we have boyfriends? We are interested in delicious food and sweets.
And tiny animals like the cat. -- Naoko Yamano
.

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