Understanding of Stack Organization

In computer organization stack is a storage structure that is used to store the temporary data during the computations. It is based on the principle Last-In, First-Out (LIFO) i.e. the last item stored is the first item to be retrieved. The main characteristics of a stack that all the insertions and deletions operations occur at the same end called “top” of the stack. Stack uses a register named, stack pointer (SP) for storing the address of the stack top. Depending upon the type of storage used, stack is of two types: register stack and memory stack. The stack is a very important component for program execution and other main application areas of the stack is to evaluate the arithmetic expression, managing function calls, temporary data storage and memory management. This chapter describes the organization of stack, type of stacks, various operations performed on the stacks and the application area of stack.