Question

The instructions that are used to call a subroutine from the main program and return to the main program after execution of called function are

(a) CALL, JMP

(b) JMP, IRET

(c) CALL, RET

(d) JMP, RET

The question was asked in a job interview.

The origin of the question is Instruction Set of 8086/8088 topic in section 8086/88 Instruction Set and Assembler Directives of Microprocessor

Answer 1

Right answer is (c) CALL, RET

To elaborate: At each CALL instruction, the IP and CS of the next instruction are pushed onto the stack, before the control is transferred to the procedure. At the end of the procedure, the RET instruction must be executed to retrieve the stored contents of IP & CS registers from a stack.