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In most systems a stack frame has a field to contain the previous value of the frame pointer register, the value it had while the caller was executing. For example, the stack frame of DrawLine would have a memory location holding the frame pointer value that DrawSquare uses (not shown in the diagram above). The value is saved upon entry to the ...
The stack segment contains the call stack, a LIFO structure, typically located in the higher parts of memory. A "stack pointer" register tracks the top of the stack; it is adjusted each time a value is "pushed" onto the stack. The set of values pushed for one function call is termed a "stack frame". A stack frame consists at minimum of a return ...
Code, constants, and other class data are stored in the "method area". The method area is logically part of the heap, but implementations may treat the method area separately from the heap, and for example might not garbage collect it. Each JVM thread also has its own call stack (called a "Java Virtual Machine stack" for clarity), which stores ...
The stack is often used to store variables of fixed length local to the currently active functions. Programmers may further choose to explicitly use the stack to store local data of variable length. If a region of memory lies on the thread's stack, that memory is said to have been allocated on the stack, i.e. stack-based memory allocation (SBMA).
The Stack offers methods to put a new object on the Stack (method push(E e)) and to get objects from the Stack (method pop()). A Stack returns the object according to last-in-first-out (LIFO), e.g. the object which was placed latest on the Stack is returned first. java.util.Stack is a standard implementation of a stack provided by Java.
Typical Java interpreters do not buffer the top-of-stack this way, however, because the program and stack have a mix of short and wide data values. If the hardwired stack machine has 2 or more top-stack registers, or a register file, then all memory access is avoided in this example and there is only 1 data cache cycle.
To emphasize the effect of a statement, a comment is often used showing the top of the stack before and after the statement; this is known as the stack effect diagram. Some stack-oriented languages may use multiple stacks for different purposes; for example, PostScript uses separate stacks for variables, dictionaries, procedures, some typical ...
A stack may be implemented as, for example, a singly linked list with a pointer to the top element. A stack may be implemented to have a bounded capacity. If the stack is full and does not contain enough space to accept another element, the stack is in a state of stack overflow. A stack is needed to implement depth-first search.