There is a little nugget here that I've always found illuminating: the mention of the text address and frame pointer, sometimes called the ip-ep pair, short for instruction pointer and the environment pointer.
The environment that a function executes in is important if, as in most interesting languages, there can be any free variables within the body of the function. What is the environment of a running function? Usually, its a collection of variable-name binding frames that determine the value of a programs variables at any point in time. The ep stands for the pointer into the data-structure (e.g. stack and its back links) that determine how variables are attached to values at a particular moment.
Lots of languages use stacks to hold these frames. In dynamic scoping languages, for example some Lisps like Emacs Lisp, a free variable's value is found in the stack frames determined by the run-time order of calls. Most modern languages use static scoping and the frames that determine a function's free variables values are based on the static nesting of functions or modules as they appear in the source code. In either case, a stack is usually where these frames that bind names to values are found. Dynamic vs static scope just changes which frames are searched for the binding of a variable at runtime (optimizations make this faster enough to be practical).
The text address is the reference to the next instruction (symbolic, virtual, or machine level) to be executed in a text segment (or code segment), the part of an object file that holds executable instructions ; I think of it as the IP of assembly language.
These two elements form a pair that in a simplified view represent a program in execution at a specific moment in time. So, this (ip, ep) pair is like a frozen program that can be brought back to life by simply loading two values into the basic execution machinery, the instruction pointer and the environment pointer. They need to be stored somewhere when a function is invoked and reloaded so that the caller is resumed upon return of the called function. When narrowly interpreted as parts of a call stack it's easy to lose sight of the power of the (ip, ep) pair. Part of Scheme's beauty was the expicit embrace of continuations as first class objects that can be flexibly manipulated by a running program and reified to put the program into a previously frozen state and awakened to continue there.
The Borrough's 5700 was designed to support a specific model of computation (Algol 60) and it's hardware description in [1] has pretty diagrams of the interaction of the ip,ep pair and the hardware (although the book is quite dated now).
The environment that a function executes in is important if, as in most interesting languages, there can be any free variables within the body of the function. What is the environment of a running function? Usually, its a collection of variable-name binding frames that determine the value of a programs variables at any point in time. The ep stands for the pointer into the data-structure (e.g. stack and its back links) that determine how variables are attached to values at a particular moment.
Lots of languages use stacks to hold these frames. In dynamic scoping languages, for example some Lisps like Emacs Lisp, a free variable's value is found in the stack frames determined by the run-time order of calls. Most modern languages use static scoping and the frames that determine a function's free variables values are based on the static nesting of functions or modules as they appear in the source code. In either case, a stack is usually where these frames that bind names to values are found. Dynamic vs static scope just changes which frames are searched for the binding of a variable at runtime (optimizations make this faster enough to be practical).
The text address is the reference to the next instruction (symbolic, virtual, or machine level) to be executed in a text segment (or code segment), the part of an object file that holds executable instructions ; I think of it as the IP of assembly language.
These two elements form a pair that in a simplified view represent a program in execution at a specific moment in time. So, this (ip, ep) pair is like a frozen program that can be brought back to life by simply loading two values into the basic execution machinery, the instruction pointer and the environment pointer. They need to be stored somewhere when a function is invoked and reloaded so that the caller is resumed upon return of the called function. When narrowly interpreted as parts of a call stack it's easy to lose sight of the power of the (ip, ep) pair. Part of Scheme's beauty was the expicit embrace of continuations as first class objects that can be flexibly manipulated by a running program and reified to put the program into a previously frozen state and awakened to continue there.
The Borrough's 5700 was designed to support a specific model of computation (Algol 60) and it's hardware description in [1] has pretty diagrams of the interaction of the ip,ep pair and the hardware (although the book is quite dated now).
[1] E. Organick, Computer System Organization: The B5700/B6700 Series, 1973, https://www.amazon.com/Computer-System-Organization-B5700-B6...