Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: returning more than 4 bytes
Message-ID: <10395@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 13 Jun 89 11:47:41 GMT
References: <1428@xn.LL.MIT.EDU> <20.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <20.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP> rex@aussie.UUCP (Rex Jaeschke) writes:
>DEC's VAX C, for example, cannot pass in anything larger than 255 longwords

Strictly speaking, a C implementation on such a machine COULD pass an
arbitrarily large amount of arguments, using a different design for
function linkage than DEC chose.  There are numerous architectural
design botches that force a language implementor to avoid what the
hardware architect thought would be helpful and instead to do things
another way.  For example, some models of the PDP-11 had a MARK
instruction that was supposed to help with procedural language
linkage, but I never found a good way to use it.