Dissolving a half century old problem about the implementation of procedures

We investigate the semantics of the procedure concept, and of one of the main techniques introduced by E. W. Dijkstra in his article Recursive Programming to implement it, namely the “static link,” sometimes also called “access link” or “lexical link.” We show that a confusion about that technique persists, even in recent textbooks. Our analysis is meant to clarify the meaning of that technique, and of the procedure concept. Our main contribution is to propose a better characterization of the “static link.”