Wrote my own Calling Convention

I have been listening to the Dungeon Hacks audiobook, and it has both reminded of my past joys of playing Angband, as well as some interesting little "hacks" I did in high school.

In high school, I wrote many programs on my TI-83, often to help me in other classes, which lead to an interesting conversation:
Student: "Teacher, Brian has written programs on his calculator for this class."
Teacher: calls me forward "Brian, is this true?"
Me: "Yes."
Teacher: "Did you write them yourself?"
Me: "Yes."
Teacher: "I do not see what the problem is."

And besides writing useful programs, I also wrote games.  All in the TI-83's BASIC.  However, the TI-83 only had 24kB of space for programs and data.  And eventually I started exceeding this limit.  So I started finding interesting hacks that would reduce the space of programs, such as the trailing " of a string is not required if that string ends the line.  Each would save 1 byte, but it started to add up.

Now, the TI-BASIC on the 83 was very primitive.  Particularly it had no GOSUB instruction, only GOTO.  So you cannot write functions / subroutines and reuse code, which would both improve the design and reduce the space required.  Now I already knew the basics (no pun intended) of C, so I knew that code should be able to call other functions and get values back.  But TI-BASIC would let you call another program and then return to the calling program after the called one finished.  That's like a function call, right?

Therefore, I wrote a library program.  Variables were global, so the calling program could set specific parameters in the global variables, call the library program.  The library would use one parameter to determine which functionality to execute, update the necessary globals and then exit, thus returning.  And consequently, I had a library of common functions which sped up my development and reduced the space I needed.

And so it was only in listening to the audio book last week, did I realize that long ago I had developed a simple calling convention in high school.  And now I teach, among other things, the x86-64 Linux ABI (i.e. calling convention) to college students.

A calling convention just dictates how each register is used when calling a function.  Which ones need to be preserved, arguments, return value, etc.  And it also dictates the management of the stack.