Absolutely.  I should have qualified my remarks by saying "when writing in assembly language", which was the universal language of all PDP-11 operating systems until Unix.  VMS adopted Bliss (which is what C would be like if it had come to us through a different dharma line[*]) as its principal implementation language.

 

Or the frame pointer, which has the advantage that the callee can push arbitrary stuff on the stack without having to explicitly account for it later, and the disadvantage that it ties up yet another register when they are in short supply.

[*] Don't laugh too hard: you yourself have already been mythologized in precisely this fashion.  See <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/two_paths.html> and <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/zealot.html>.

John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
Mark Twain on Cecil Rhodes: I admire him, I freely admit it,
and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.