Specifically, I was talking about an area of memory that is made available
also via stack instructions. push/pop is, strictly speaking, a hardware
stack, yes. But in the context of this discussion (C programming, frames
etc.), a stack is an area of memory that can be modified via stack-oriented
instructions (push/pop), directly as memory (lda, sta), and whose address is
stored in a special register to facilitate the latter as part of a standard
ABI. I'm sorry if I was unclear.
- Marcel

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Gerhard Fiedler <lists@connectionbrazil.com
> wrote:

> Olin Lathrop wrote:
>
> > Marcel Birthelmer wrote:
> >> It doesn't have a proper HW stack, in the sense that other processors
> >> do
> >
> > It can do push and pop in single instruction cycles.  I don't see
> > what else it would have to do to qualify for being a "hardware"
> > stack.
>
> In this context, size? This is in the context of C compilers and
> re-entrant functions, which typically means that all data is on the
> stack. This requires that besides the stack being a "hardware" stack, it
> also has a stack that can be adapted to the application's memory
> requirements. PIC18 hardware stacks typically can't be. That's probably
> the "sense" Marcel was talking about -- which someone programming in C
> probably would know :)
>
> Gerhard
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