Stack Operations

The stack is one of the most interesting capabilities of an operating system. The concept of a stack can best be explained by comparing it to the stack of lunch trays in your school cafeteria. When you put a tray on the stack, the tray that was previously on top of the stack is covered up. When you take a tray from the stack, you take the tray from the top of the stack, which happens to be the last one put on. More formally, in computer science terms, the stack is a data structure that has the quality of a first in, last out (FILO) queue.

The process of putting items on the stack is called a push and is done in the assembly code language with the push command. Likewise, the process of taking an item from the stack is called a pop and is accomplished with the pop command in assembly language code.