OS Data Structures Interview Question:

Explain applications of stacks and their uses?

Submitted by: Administrator

Keeping track of nested invocation calls in a procedural
programming language, such as C/C++.
Each function call results in a new entry being placed into
the program run-time stack. This new
entry contains memory space for local variables (which can
grow dynamically) and for a return
pointer to the instruction in the function that invoked the
current function (caller/callee). As
functions terminate, their stack entry is "popped out," with
the return values written to the proper
location in the caller.
Since nested procedural/ function invocation levels are
entered and exited in LIFO order, a stack
is the most appropriate data structure to handle this
functionality.
Evaluating arithmetic expressions.
Stacks can be used to parse arithmetic expressions and
evaluate them efficiently, as we shall
see as part of this assignment.
To eliminate the need for direct implementation of recursion.
As recursive function calls require a lot of overhead, it is
often the case that recursive algorithms
are "unrolled" into non-recursive ones. Since recursive
calls are entered/exited in LIFO order the
use of stacks to mimic recursion is a natural choice.
Submitted by: Administrator