Stack - Data Structure

 A Stack is a linear data structure that follows the LIFO (Last-In-First-Out) principle. Stack has one end, whereas the Queue has two ends (front and rear). It contains only one pointer top pointer pointing to the topmost element of the stack. Whenever an element is added in the stack, it is added on the top of the stack, and the element can be deleted only from the stack. In other words, a stack can be defined as a container in which insertion and deletion can be done from the one end known as the top of the stack.

Some key points related to stack

• It is called as stack because it behaves like a real-world stack, piles of books, etc.
• A Stack is an abstract data type with a pre-defined capacity, which means that it can store the elements of a limited size.
• It is a data structure that follows some order to insert and delete the elements, and that order can be LIFO or FILO.

Working of Stack

Stack works on the LIFO pattern. As we can observe in the below figure there are five memory blocks in the stack; therefore, the size of the stack is 5.

Suppose we want to store the elements in a stack and let's assume that stack is empty. We have taken the stack of size 5 as shown below in which we are pushing the elements one by one until the stack becomes full.

Standard Stack Operations

The following are some common operations implemented on the stack:

• push(): When we insert an element in a stack then the operation is known as a push. If the stack is full then the overflow condition occurs.
• pop(): When we delete an element from the stack, the operation is known as a pop. If the stack is empty means that no element exists in the stack, this state is known as an underflow state.
• isEmpty(): It determines whether the stack is empty or not.
• isFull(): It determines whether the stack is full or not.'
• peek(): It returns the element at the given position.
• count(): It returns the total number of elements available in a stack.
• change(): It changes the element at the given position.
• display(): It prints all the elements available in the stack.

PUSH operation

The steps involved in the PUSH operation is given below:

• Before inserting an element in a stack, we check whether the stack is full.
• If we try to insert the element in a stack, and the stack is full, then the overflow condition occurs.
• When we initialize a stack, we set the value of top as -1 to check that the stack is empty.
• When the new element is pushed in a stack, first, the value of the top gets incremented, i.e., top=top+1, and the element will be placed at the new position of the top.
• The elements will be inserted until we reach the max size of the stack.

POP operation

The steps involved in the POP operation is given below:

• Before deleting the element from the stack, we check whether the stack is empty.
• If we try to delete the element from the empty stack, then the underflow condition occurs.
• If the stack is not empty, we first access the element which is pointed by the top
• Once the pop operation is performed, the top is decremented by 1, i.e., top=top-1.