At 15:03 10/31/2002 -0500, Greg Smith wrote: I understand that much.... but why did Intel want you to use a top-down
stack ??
Because electrical engineers and computer designers stand on each others shoulders, just like mathemeticians. The DEC PDP-11 stack grew down (heck, I think the -7 did too), and everyone who learned the Maynard, MA style of design followed it.
I remember from my Pascal days that you could reference your caller's local variables, so I guess it's easier to reference them in a top-down stack.
That's certainly true, although GCC can't claim the same reason. GCC goes way back before the Intel platform became it's most common target, and the early machines it ran on supported *signed* stack offsets! So reaching "down" was just as easy as "up". Ross Patterson
