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http://linuxgazette.net/issue94/ramankutty.html
5. Using The Stack
A section of your program's memory is reserved for use as a stack. The Intel 80386 and above microprocessors contain a register called stack pointer, esp, which stores the address of the top of stack. Figure 1 below shows three integer values, 49,30 and 72, stored on the stack (each integer occupying four bytes) with esp register holding the address of the top of stack.
Figure 1
Unlike the stack analogous to a pile of bricks growing up wards, on Intel machines stack grows down wards. Figure 2 shows the stack layout after the execution of the instruction pushl $15.
Figure 2
The stack pointer register is decremented by four and the number 15 is stored as four bytes at locations 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991.
The instruction popl %eax copies the value at top of stack (four bytes) to the eax register and increments esp by four. What if you do not want to copy the value at top of stack to any register? You just execute the instruction addl $4, %esp which simply increments the stack pointer.
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In Listing 3, the instruction call foo pushes the address of the instruction after the call in the calling program on to the stack and branches to foo. The subroutine ends with ret which transfers control to the instruction whose address is taken from the top of stack. Obviously, the top of stack must contain a valid return address.
Anche se non ho mai usato asm.