Learning Stack: Structured, Object Oriented, Generic and Design Pattern Approach

The concept of a stack, its usage and implementation hold central importance in computer programming courses taught in electrical and computer system engineering programs, as well as in computer science discipline. Stack covers all types of computational problem that can be solved with Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) principle. In the presence of a conventional course outlines and literature, there is a strong need to define standard topics and relevant subtopics for teaching stack. In this article, we highlight and address this problem, and as a principal contribution we define a taxonomy of stack from the perspective of its implementation using structured, and object oriented programming paradigms, and have also discussed its implementation using design patterns. To this end, we have used C++ language to present the code for different operations, and have supported the explanation with the help of memory diagrams, complexity issues, and example usage. We have also discussed the formal definition of stack.