Introduction to Stacks and Queues

In many applications we have collections of objects we want to maintain. The operations for these objects are simple.

We would want to:

• Add something to a collection
• Remove something from a collection
• Iterate through the objects in a collection and perform some operation on them
• Test if an object is empty

Where a Stack and a Queue fundamentally differ is in the way we remove objects, in a stack we take out the item that was most recently added (push (insert) and pop(remove)) where as with a queue we examine the item least recently added (enqueue (insert) and dequeue(remove)).