How to call procedures, or second thoughts on Ackermann's function

Various problems have been encountered in using Ackermann's function to measure the efficiency of procedure calls in System Implementation Languages. Although measurements have been made of some 60 systems, the ones presented here are included only when comparisons are possible. For conventional machine design, it is possible to draw some conclusions on desirable instruction set features. A surprising result from the analysis is that implementation quality is far more important than the overheads implied by language design.