What do Push and Pop mean for Stacks?

Question

long story short my lecturer is crap, and was showing us infix to prefix stacks via an overhead projector and his bigass shadow was blocking everything so i missed the importan

Answer 1

after all these good examples adam shankman still can't make sense of it. I think you should open up some code and try it. The second you try a myStack.Push(1) and myStack.Pop(1) you really should get the picture. But by the looks of it, even that will be a challenge for you!

Answer 2

A stack in principle is quite simple: imagine a rifle's clip - You can only access the topmost bullet - taking it out is called "pop", inserting a new one is called "push".
A very useful example for that is for applications that allow you to "undo".
Imagine you save each state of the application in a stack. e.g. the state of the application after every type the user makes.
Now when the user presses "undo" you just "pop" the previous state from the stack. For every action the user does - you "push" the new state to the stack (that's of course simplified).
About what your lecturer specifically was doing - in order to explain it some more information would be helpful..

Answer 3

A Stack is a LIFO (Last In First Out) data structure. The push and pop operations are simple. Push puts something on the stack, pop takes something off. You put onto the top, and take off the top, to preserve the LIFO order.

edit -- corrected from FIFO, to LIFO. Facepalm!

to illustrate, you start with a blank stack

|

then you push 'x'

| 'x'

then you push 'y'

| 'x' 'y'

then you pop

| 'x'