A formal model and specification language for procedure calling conventions
POPL '95 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
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Procedure calling conventions are used to provide uniform procedure-call interfaces. Applications, such as compilers and debuggers, 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 a number of 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.