Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Section 21.5 Stacks

• A stack is a last-in, first-out (LIFO) data structure (p. 886). The primary methods used to manipulate a stack are push (p. 887) and pop (p. 887), which add a new node to the stack’s top and remove a node from the top, respectively. Method pop returns the removed node’s data.

• When a method call is made, the called method must know how to return to its caller, so the return address is pushed onto the program-execution stack. If a series of method calls occurs, the successive return values are pushed onto the stack in last-in, first-out order.

• The program-execution stack contains the space created for local variables on each invocation of a method. When the method returns to its caller, the space for that method’s local ...