Implementing Procedures

Procedures play a critical role in the development of software systems. They provide abstractions for control flow and naming. They provide basic information hiding. They are the building block on which systems provide interfaces. They are one of the principal forms of abstraction in Algol-like languages; object-oriented languages rely on procedures to implement their methods or code members. This chapter takes an in-depth look at the implementation of procedures and procedure calls, from the perspective of a compiler writer. It highlights the implementation similarities and differences between Algol-like languages and object-oriented languages. The Advanced Topics section presents a brief introduction to the algorithms used to manage the runtime heap.