On Friday, Apr 16, 2004, at 11:00 US/Pacific, Sergio Masci wrote:

> there is very little reason why the stack should be dynamic and all
> the burden of using it be placed on the processor at run time

While you are at least partially correct IN THEORY, in practice most
modern compilers expect to use a processor-maintained stack for local
variables, and if your micro doesn't support that, you ensure yourself
that the compilers you use will be slow in coming, have annoying
quirks, and probably cost more than for other chips.

The best thing for a new microcontroller architecture is for the gcc
port to ship before the hardware does...

(It's not just the lack of local stack variables that is annoying with
a HW stack, there's also the limitted depth, and the inability to see
how close you are to overflowing, and other things...)

BillW

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