returning more than 4 bytes

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <20.UUL1.3#5077 at aussie.UUCP> rex at 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.