How many stacks?

[T. William Wells]

In article <8604 at ihlpb.ATT.COM> tainter at ihlpb.UUCP (55521-Tainter,J.A.) writes:
: You haven't eliminated the stack in this case.  You have just made it
: less obviously a stack.  You will find that these frames still need to
: form a stack for call returns.

Yes he has.  A `stack', as he was using the term, refers to a
particular way of using memory.  What he has is a linked list.
Both have the characteristics you need for implementing
recursion.

There is a use of `stack' that refers to any way of doing LIFO
but that use does *not* talk about implementation.  Since the
original discussion was talking about stacks in the sense of
hardware stacks or memory set aside for a stack, this use is
irrelevant.

This is an example of a generic problem on the net: seeing
similarities at some level of description and then demanding that
the similar things be called by the same name.  So, since a
linked list can be accessed on a last-in, first-out basis, as can
a stack, this notion would require calling both a stack.  *A
linked list is not a stack.* Of course, this problem is
aggravated here because the concept of a data structure that
implements LIFO is also called a `stack'.

There was a similar sillyness recently where the words
`iteration' and `recursion' were confused.

Let's keep our concepts straight.

Please?

---
Bill
novavax!proxftl!bill