BigPatents India

Following execution of a subroutine, a return instruction is executed having an address as an input operand thereto. This input operand is compared with one or more predetermined values to detect a match and the return instruction response is selected in dependence upon whether or not a match is detected. Thus, the return address value can be used to invoke differing return instruction responses, such as an exception return response or a procedure return response. The one or more predetermined addresses may be conveniently allocated to the highest memory addresses within the memory map.