Re: Recursive Call

Arnold Trembley wrote: 


Joe Zitzelberger wrote:

(snip) 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. Perhaps someone can correct me if my impression is wrong.



At least on ESA architecture and later the PROGRAM CALL and related instructions do indeed use hardware-supported stacks, the Linkage Stack, which is allocated in 64 KiB blocks and tracked via hardware control registers. The Program Call instruction and its management complexity is generally hidden from application code, as it main (only?) usage from the application code standpoint is to issue function requests to the operating system that previously would have required using SVC Supervisor Calls.
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Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR jREMOVEcCAPSewing@xxxxxxx
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