OBJECT ORIENTED APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR PRESERVING STACK FRAME IDENTITY DURING INLINED METHOD CALLS

An object oriented mechanism and method provide exact information about the current invocation stack even when methods are inlined. A virtual stack frame mechanism determines whether a called method has been inlined, and counts both virtual frames and real frames when determining information corresponding to a called method. The virtual stack frame mechanism is preferably implemented in an object oriented class that provides methods for determining information corresponding to a called method.