What does "cdecl" stand for?
Yes, I know that "cdecl" is the name of a prominent calling convention, so please don't explain calling conventions to me. What I'm asking is what the abbreviation (?) "cdecl" actually stands for. I think it's a poor naming choice, because at first sight it reminds one of "C declarator" (a rather unique syntactic aspect of C). In fact, there is a program called cdecl whose sole purpose is to decipher C declarators. But the C declarator syntax has absolutely nothing to do with calling conventions as far as I can tell.
Simplified version: "stdcall" stands for "standard calling convention". What does "cdecl" stand for?
Answer
It comes from C function that was declared (in contrast to a C function that was not declared which was common in K&R C).
At the time it was coexisting with pascal calling convention (wher the callee cleared the stack), so it kind of made sense to call it after the programming language.
Everything you might ever want to know about calling conventions.