According to one aspect of the invention, there is provided a method for renaming memory references to stack locations in a computer processing system. The method includes the steps of detecting stack references that use architecturally defined stack access methods, and replacing the stack references with references to processor-internal registers. The architecturally defined stack access methods include memory accesses that use one of a stack pointer, a frame pointer, and an argument pointer. Moreover, the architecturally defined stack access methods include push, pop, and other stack manipulation operations.