Well, if you believed as the author did that arguments are always pushed onto the stack, you are pretty ignorant--most major architectures these days don't use

Well, if you believed as the author did that arguments are always pushed onto the stack, you are pretty ignorant--most major architectures these days don't use the stack for arguments, at least not for the first several arguments. (Semi-random tangent: the hardest bug I ever had the pleasure of debugging was when I discovered that the PLT glue code to load an entry into the PLT was unexpectedly clobbering a register that the calling convention said needed to be preserved. By very, very careful using non-default calling conventions across shared object boundaries!)