ESP = ? stack pointer
What does E stand for here?
UPDATE
RSP for 64bit?
What does R
mean here?
ESP = ? stack pointer
What does E stand for here?
UPDATE
RSP for 64bit?
What does R
mean here?
E
stands for Extended
With the advent of the 32-bit 80386 processor, the 16-bit general-purpose registers, base registers, index registers, instruction pointer, and FLAGS register, but not the segment registers, were expanded to 32 bits. This is represented by prefixing an "E" (for Extended) to the register names in x86 assembly language.
Perhaps for consistency with the other 32-bit registers: EAX
, EBX
etc.
For those, E
means "extended" - i.e. to 32 bits (the 16-bit versions are called AX
, BX
etc.)
P.S. according to The Free Dictionary, ESP
stands for Extended Stack Pointer.
R is just for "register", with the new registers called just r8-r15. Since the old ones also needed names for their extended versions, the e was just swapped to r.