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Stacks are an important way of supporting nested or recursive function calls. This type of stack is used implicitly by the compiler to support CALL and RETURN statements (or their equivalents) and is not manipulated directly by the programmer. Some programming languages use the stack to store data that is local to a procedure.
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).
This type of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or machine stack, and is often shortened to simply the "stack". Although maintenance of the call stack is important for the proper functioning of most software , the details are normally hidden and automatic in high-level programming languages .
Most modern implementations of a function call use a call stack, a special case of the stack data structure, to implement function calls and returns. Each procedure call creates a new entry, called a stack frame , at the top of the stack; when the procedure returns, its stack frame is deleted from the stack, and its space may be used for other ...
In computing, a stack trace (also called stack backtrace [1] or stack traceback [2]) is a report of the active stack frames at a certain point in time during the execution of a program. When a program is run, memory is often dynamically allocated in two places: the stack and the heap .
Newer processors contain a dedicated stack engine to optimize stack operations. Pentium M was the first x86 processor to introduce a stack engine. In its implementation, the stack pointer is split among two registers: ESP O , which is a 32-bit register, and ESP d , an 8-bit delta value that is updated directly by stack operations.
Single-ended types, such as stack, generally only admit a single peek, at the end that is modified. Double-ended types, such as deques, admit two peeks, one at each end. Names for peek vary. "Peek" or "top" are common for stacks, while for queues "front" is common. Operations on deques have varied names, often "front" and "back" or "first" and ...
When used to implement a set of stacks, the structure is called a spaghetti stack, cactus stack or saguaro stack (after the saguaro, a kind of cactus). [1] Parent pointer trees are also used as disjoint-set data structures. The structure can be regarded as a set of singly linked lists that share part of their structure, in particular, their ...