stack

n. The set of things a person has to do in the future. One speaks of the
next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack. I'm
afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my
stack. I haven't done it yet because every time I pop my stack something new
gets pushed. If you are interrupted several times in the middle of a
conversation, My stack overflowed means I forget what we were talking about.
The implication is that more items were pushed onto the stack than could be
remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The usual physical example
of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates or trays sitting
on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top they all sink
down, and when you take one off the top the rest spring up a bit. See also
push and pop. ( The Art of Computer Programming , second edition, vol. 1, p.
236) says: Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues
independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been
called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, nesting stores, piles,
last-in-first-out ( LIFO ) lists, and even yo-yo lists! The term stack was
originally coined by Edsger  Dijkstra, who was quite proud of it.

