stack

stack (stæk)
—n
1.	an ordered pile or heap
2.	a large orderly pile of hay, straw, etc, for storage in the open air
3.	(often plural) library science compactly spaced bookshelves, used to house collections of books in an area usually prohibited to library users
4.	a number of aircraft circling an airport at different altitudes, awaiting their signal to land
5.	a large amount: a stack of work
6.	military a pile of rifles or muskets in the shape of a cone
7.	(Brit) a measure of coal or wood equal to 108 cubic feet
8.	chimney stack See smokestack
9.	a vertical pipe, such as the funnel of a ship or the soil pipe attached to the side of a building
10.	a high column of rock, esp one isolated from the mainland by the erosive action of the sea
11.	an area in a computer memory for temporary storage
—vb
12.	to place in a stack; pile: to stack bricks on a lorry
13.	to load or fill up with piles of something: to stack a lorry with bricks
14.	to control (a number of aircraft waiting to land at an airport) so that each flies at a different altitude
15.	stack the cards to prearrange the order of a pack of cards secretly so that the deal will benefit someone
[C13: from Old Norse stakkr haystack, of Germanic origin; related to Russian stog]
'stackable
—adj
'stacker
—n

stack

Meaning "set of shelves on which books are set out" is from 1879. Used of the chimneys of factories, locomotives, etc., since 1825. The verb is attested from early 14c., "to pile up grain;" the meaning "arrange unfairly" (in stack the deck) is first recorded 1825. Stack up "compare against" is 1903, from notion of piles of poker chips (1896). Stacked, of women's bodies, "well-built in a sexual sense" is from 1942.

stack   (stāk)  Pronunciation Key  An isolated, columnar mass or island of rock along a coastal cliff. Stacks are formed by the erosion of cliffs through wave action and are larger than chimneys.

stack

n. 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.

At MIT, PDL used to be a more common synonym for stack in all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere else stack seems to be the preferred term. Knuth ("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!

stack definition

programming
(See below for synonyms) A data structure for storing items which are to be accessed in last-in first-out order.
The operations on a stack are to create a new stack, to "push" a new item onto the top of a stack and to "pop" the top item off. Error conditions are raised by attempts to pop an empty stack or to push an item onto a stack which has no room for further items (because of its implementation).
Most processors include support for stacks in their instruction set architectures. Perhaps the most common use of stacks is to store subroutine arguments and return addresses. This is usually supported at the machine code level either directly by "jump to subroutine" and "return from subroutine" instructions or by auto-increment and auto-decrement addressing modes, or both. These allow a contiguous area of memory to be set aside for use as a stack and use either a special-purpose register or a general purpose register, chosen by the user, as a stack pointer.
The use of a stack allows subroutines to be recursive since each call can have its own calling context, represented by a stack frame or activation record. There are many other uses. The programming language Forth uses a data stack in place of variables when possible.
Although a stack may be considered an object by users, implementations of the object and its access details differ. For example, a stack may be either ascending (top of stack is at highest address) or descending. It may also be "full" (the stack pointer points at the top of stack) or "empty" (the stack pointer points just past the top of stack, where the next element would be pushed). The full/empty terminology is used in the Acorn Risc Machine and possibly elsewhere.
In a list-based or functional language, a stack might be implemented as a linked list where a new stack is an empty list, push adds a new element to the head of the list and pop splits the list into its head (the popped element) and tail (the stack in its modified form).
At MIT, pdl used to be a more common synonym for stack, and this may still be true. Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:
Many people who realised the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, dumps, nesting stores, piles, last-in first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-10)

stack

In addition to the idioms beginning with stack, also see blow one's top (stack); cards are stacked; needle in a haystack; swear on a stack of bibles;.