The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

5.12 Procedures and the Stack

Because procedures use the stack to hold the return address, you must exercise caution when pushing and popping data within a procedure. Consider the following simple (and defective) procedure:

procedure MessedUp; @noframe; @nodisplay;
begin MessedUp;

     push( eax );
     ret();

end MessedUp;

At the point the program encounters the ret instruction, the 80x86 stack takes the form shown in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1. Stack contents before ret in MessedUp procedure

The ret instruction isn't aware that the value on the top of stack is not a valid address. It simply pops whatever value is on the top of the stack and jumps to that location. ...