push ebp move ebp, esp sub esp, fun_0_stacksize ; calculating foo() and saving the temporary call foo push eax ; loading the temporary

push ebp move ebp, esp sub esp, fun_0_stacksize ; calculating foo() and saving the temporary call foo push eax ; loading the temporary and... pop eax ; ...assigning it to "a" mov [ebp+fun_0_var_a], eax ; calculating "a+1" starts by evaluating "a"... mov eax, [ebp+fun_0_var_a] ; ...and saving it as a temporary... push eax ; ..then by evaluating 1 mov eax, 1 ; ...and saving it as a temporary push eax ; then you load two temporaries, add them together... pop ebx pop eax add eax, ebx ; ...and save the temporary result push eax ; then you load the temporary result and... pop eax ; ...save it as "b" mov [ebp+fun_0_var_b], eax ; at this point, you know the total number of local variables ; the "fun_NNN_" prefix is used because EQU constants cannot be ; redefined (obviously, or they wouldn't support forward uses) fun_0_stacksize EQU 8 fun_0_var_a EQU -4 fun_0_var_b EQU -8 ; epilogue mov esp, ebp pop ebp retn Notice how accessing the locals is done via a separate Base Pointer register EBP instead of the Stack Pointer register ESP (in fact, ESP-based addressing mode is encoded really, really ugly on x86), so that pushing&popping of temporaries doesn't mess up the loads/stores of local variables. Yes, the code quality is appalling but... it works. In fact, I think Nils M. Holm's T3X compiler uses a similar approach as well. Of course, if you can allow yourself to use some IR, you can actually assign registers to variables and temporaries and do a much better job.