Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

7.8. Method Call Stack and Activation Records

To understand how Visual Basic performs method calls, we first need to consider a data structure (i.e., collection of related data items) known as a stack. You can think of a stack as analogous to a pile of dishes. When a dish is placed on the pile, it is normally placed at the top (referred to as pushing the dish onto the stack). Similarly, when a dish is removed from the pile, it is normally removed from the top (referred to as popping the dish off the stack). Stacks are known as last-in, first-out (LIFO) data structures—the last item pushed (inserted) onto the stack is the first item popped (removed) from the stack.

When a program calls a method, the called method must know how to return to the ...