ENTER and LEAVE in Assembly?

Question

I was reading The Art of Assembly Language (Randall Hyde, link to Amazon) and I tried out a console application in that book. It was a program that created a new co

Answer 1

This is the setup for the stack frame (activation record) for the function. Internally it normally looks something like this:

push( ebp );         // Save a copy of the old EBP value

mov( esp, ebp );     // Get ptr to base of activation record into EBP

sub( NumVars, esp ); // Allocate storage for local variables.

Then when the stack frame is to be destroyed again, you have to do something along the following lines:

   mov( ebp, esp );    // Deallocate locals and clean up stack.

   pop( ebp );         // Restore pointer to caller's activation record.

   ret();              // Return to the caller.

Here is a better explanation of it using HLA. Though it is well explained in the book you're reading, as I have that book too, and I've read the section explaining it.