Art of Assembly Language, 1st Edition

5.2. 5.2 Procedures

Most procedural programming languages implement procedures using the call/return mechanism. That is, some code calls a procedure, the procedure does its thing, and then the procedure returns to the caller. The call and return instructions provide the 80×86's procedure invocation mechanism. The calling code calls a procedure with the call instruction; the procedure returns to the caller with the ret instruction. For example, the following 80×86 instruction calls the HLA Standard Library stdout.newln routine:^[88]

^[88] Normally you would call newln using the high level "newln();" syntax, but the call instruction works as well.

call stdout.newln;

The stdout.newln procedure prints a newline sequence to the console device and returns ...