A Formal Model and Specification Language for Procedure Calling Conventions 1
نویسنده
چکیده
Procedure calling conventions are used to provide uniform procedure call interfaces. Applications, such as compilers and debug-gers, which generate, or process procedures at the machine-language abstraction level require knowledge of the calling convention. In this paper, we develop a formal model for procedure calling conventions called P-FSA's. Using this model, we are able to ensure several completeness and consistency properties of calling conventions. Currently, applications that manipulate procedures implement conventions in an ad-hoc manner. The resulting code is complicated with details, difficult to maintain, and often riddled with errors. To alleviate the situation, we introduce a calling convention specification language, called CCL. The combination of CCL and P-FSA's facilitates the accurate specification of conventions that can be shown to be both consistent and complete. 1 Introduction Procedures, or functions, in programming languages work in concert to implement the intended function of programs. To facilitate this cooperation between procedures, we must accurately specify the procedure-call interface. This interface must define how to pass actual parameters and describe function return values, and which machine resources, such as registers, the called procedure must preserve. This understanding between the caller 2 and callee 3 is known as the procedure calling convention. Because of the machine-specific nature of the calling convention, calling conventions vary widely from machine-to-machine, programming-language to programming language , and,
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