5.26 For More Information

The electronic edition of this book on the accompanying CD-ROM contains a whole "volume" on advanced and intermediate procedures. The information on this chapter was taken from the introductory and intermediate chapters in the electronic edition. While the information appearing in this chapter covers 99 percent of the material assembly programmers typically use, there is additional information on procedures and parameters that you may find interesting. In particular, the electronic edition covers additional parameter passing mechanisms (pass by value/result, pass by result, pass by name, and pass by lazy evaluation) and goes into greater detail about the places you can pass parameters. The electronic version of this text also covers iterators, thunks, and other advanced procedure types. You should also check out the HLA documentation for more details on HLA's procedure facilities. Finally, a good compiler construction textbook will cover additional details about run-time support for procedures.

This chapter discussed only 32-bit near procedures (appropriate for operating systems like Windows and Linux). For information about procedures in 16-bit code (including near and far procedures), check out the 16-bit edition of this book, also found on the accompanying CD-ROM.

HLA supports the ability to nest procedures; that is, you can declare a procedure in the declaration section of some other procedure and use displays and static links to access automatic variables in the enclosing procedures. HLA also supports advanced parameter pointer facilities. This text does not discuss these features because they're somewhat advanced, and very few assembly language programmers take advantage of these facilities in their programs. However, these features are very handy in certain situations. Once you're comfortable with procedures and assembly language programming in general, you should read about HLA's facilities for nested procedures in the HLA documentation and in the chapters on intermediate and advanced procedures in the electronic version of this book appearing on the CD-ROM.