davew@hp-ptp.HP.COM (Dave_Waller) (04/10/90)
Hi gang! Well, I finally got W.A.C. Mier-Jedrzejowicz's book, "CUSTOMIZING YOUR HP-28", and have learned alot about machine language on the Saturn chip... Pretty neat. However, there is a detail that I have not found in the book yet, and was hoping one of you more experienced folks could help me out. As I understand it, the stack is not composed of the actual objects themselves, but rather pointers (i.e. the addresses) of where the objects are to be found in memory. This has the benefit of not using up tons of memory for large objects that are recalled to the stack. Now concetually, this all works fine as long as we're talking about a named object (i.e. a "variable" that has been created with STO). However, what about unnamed objects that have not been STOred? Where are they kept in memory? For instance, when one does LCD->, where is the actual object located in memory, and how is it created? I would like to know this so that I can have a machine code routine return an object to the stack; yet, I need to be able to allocate the memory for the actual object before I can push its address onto the stack. Where is the "limbo" for unnamed stack objects, and how is it managed? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Dave Waller \ The opinions expressed are solely my own, and in no way Hewlett-Packard Co. \ represent those of my employer (but we all know dave@hpdstma.ptp.hp.com | hplabs!hpdstma!dave \ they should!)