The set of things a person has to do in the future. One speaks of the
next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack.
"I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed
way down on my stack." "I haven't done it yet because every time I
pop my stack something new gets pushed." If you are interrupted
several times in the middle of a conversation, "My stack overflowed"
means "I forget what we were talking about." The implication is that
more items were pushed onto the stack than could be remembered, so
the least recent items were lost. The usual physical example of a
stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates or trays
sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top
they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest spring
up a bit. See also {push} and {pop}.
(The Art of Computer Programming, second edition, vol. 1, p. 236)
says:
Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues
independently have given other names to these structures: stacks
have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars,
nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even
yo-yo lists!
The term "stack" was originally coined by Edsger Dijkstra, who was
quite proud of it.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {accumulator}{foreground}{pop}{push}]