Arguments and Parameters

The tasks set out in figure 11.1 of chapter 11 include the preparation of argument information — for example the value of an argument expression, a pointer to an argument variable or a pointer to an argument vector — and the placing of this information in a location within the new procedure activation’s data frame. This chapter concentrates on this apparently insignificant aspect of run-time support in part because it is so often inefficiently implemented in practice and in part because compilers do not always perform all possible syntactic checks at compile-time.