I can't find a reference for DEC's PDP processors, but the 68000 (Motorola) processor family had LINK and UNLINK instructions useful for constructing a (calling

I can't find a reference for DEC's PDP processors, but the 68000 (Motorola) processor family had LINK and UNLINK instructions useful for constructing a (calling) stack frame. DEC's later VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) processor line included stack frames baked into the silicon. The CALLS instruction was called with the number of 32 bit arguments previously pushed onto the stack; the CALLG instruction was called with a pointer to a memory structure consisting of an argument count and an argument vector. From the foregoing progression it can be inferred that this idiom was common and deemed a Good Thing by some faction in computer science of the time. As for functions with specific names, when linking against libraries there are typically symbol tables for resolving references between separately compiled modules. As a self-professed (I took out a small display ad in the print publications _Computer World_ and _Asian Computing Monthly_ in 1984) "VAX Hacker for Hire", I made use of C's utter lack of concern for such things by declaring a char* arg and using pointer arithmetic to get the actual count of args to implement optional parameters; I wasn't the only one. Between that and abusing the REF and VAL pragmas in pretty much all DEC programming languages, it was good times.