info-c digest v2n226

[Rick Genter x18]

> Can someone explain to me what the difference is between a hardware stack
> and a software stack? 

The difference is that a machine with a hardware stack can dereference
the top of the stack and modify the stack pointer as an atomic operation
(usually via an addressing mode).  A machine with "only" software stacks
must use multiple machine instructions to perform this operation; this
makes things hairy in the world of interrupt processing.  Not impossible;
just hairy.  An example is the IBM/370 architecture: there one uses
static saveareas for handling interruptions/exceptions.  Yuck.

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Rick Genter					...!{buita,bbn}!lti!reg
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