The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

5.11 Low-Level Procedures and the call Instruction

The 80x86 call instruction does two things. First, it pushes the address of the instruction immediately following the call onto the stack; then it transfers control to the address of the specified procedure. The value that call pushes onto the stack is known as the return address. When the procedure wants to return to the caller and continue execution with the first statement following the call instruction, the procedure simply pops the return address off the stack and jumps (indirectly) to that address. Most procedures return to their caller by executing a ret (return) instruction. The ret instruction pops a return address off the stack and transfers control indirectly to the address it pops ...