Glossary
•Push – Pushing is the operation of putting something new
on the top of a stack. Computers use pushing to store the return pointer when
one subroutine calls another subroutine.
•Pop – Popping is the
operation of taking something off the top of a stack. Computers use pop operations to retrieve the stored return pointer
and use it as a reference to get back to the
original subroutine that made the call to the subroutine that just
finished.
•Return pointer – A return pointer is a special kind of pointer that
computers use on a stack to remember what
instruction they were about to execute in one subroutine when they had to go start executing another subroutine.
•C – C is the most
commonly used high-level computer programming language, and the one most responsible for the buffer overflow
problem. C source code is compiled
into a low-level language that a computer
can understand, such as a bunch of pieces of paper with numbers written on them in mailboxes.