> As you can see in C18 it is not only me who calls this as an overlay :-) -

Yeah, Microchip. I have to explain each year (in my PIC class) that what 
the rest of the world calls RAM is called "general purpose file 
registers" in PIC datasheets, and that is only the start...

> And no, it was not me who designed C18 :-) Anyway, I would not mind calling
> it as static or pseudo stack but I do think that this naming is misleading.

Overlays were already used in the early TurboPascal compilers (and 
probably long before that, guess why compilers were often written in 
separate passes?), to break the 64K code limit. IIRC the programmer had 
to specify which code parts overlayed, so I think the term overlay is 
more commonly associated with a mechanism that it visible to and/or 
managed by the programmer.

A static stack is (except for the ban on recursion/reentrancy) 
completely invisible to the user. And it takes the same amount of RAM as 
a real data stack.

-- 

Wouter van Ooijen

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Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: www.voti.nl
consultancy, development, PICmicro products
docent Hogeschool van Utrecht: www.voti.nl/hvu

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