Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!apple!sun-barr!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Stack
Message-ID: <117350@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 24 Jul 89 18:52:24 GMT
References: <2105@hub.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 22

In article <2105@hub.UUCP> dougp@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes:
>	Is there any particular reasor that no microprocessor has limit
>registors for the stack? 

The 80286/386/486 all have a limit set for their stack segment. If you
attempt to write outside of it in either direction it will generate an
exception. 

The Motorola architectures don't include an on chip MMU (until the '030
came along) and since this is primarily an MMU question they left it up
to the application to appropriately intialize the MMU. 

The Lattice compiler generates code to check for stack overflow before
entering each function. However it does this by knowing how much stack
the function you are calling is going to take. For DOS calls it has to
guess, sometimes it guesses wrong.


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.
"A most excellent barbarian ... Genghis Kahn!"