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Array Implementation of Stack

The document discusses implementing a stack using an array in C/C++. It describes push, pop, and isEmpty operations. While simple, this implementation has limitations like a fixed size and cannot efficiently grow. Linked lists are generally preferable unless the size is known and small.

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Suresh Kaki
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3 views

Array Implementation of Stack

The document discusses implementing a stack using an array in C/C++. It describes push, pop, and isEmpty operations. While simple, this implementation has limitations like a fixed size and cannot efficiently grow. Linked lists are generally preferable unless the size is known and small.

Uploaded by

Suresh Kaki
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ARRAY IMPLEMENTATION OF

STACK
A better implementation of Stack is usually using linked list unless you are sure of

the number of elements in array. But if you are just starting with data structures

and are not familiar with linked list, you can try implementing stack in an array.

While using array to implement stack is easy, it has limitation that the stack cannot

grow beyond a fixed size (of array).

Operations

There can be many operations on stack like this post, but we will discuss only three

basic operations on the stack

Push – inserting element at the top of stack.

Pop – removing the top element of stack.

isEmpty – check is stack is empty or not.

Code

For simplicity reason lets assume the array (which hold stack) to be global and

accessible to all the functions.

1 // Max number of elements a stack can hold

2 #define MAX 100

3
4 // Array to hold the stack

5 int s[MAX];

7 // will hold the index of top element of the stack.

8 // top == -1 means stack is empty

9 int top = -1;

10

11 /** Push the element if there is a space in the Stack

12 * If Stack is full then does nothing.

13 */

14 void push(int value)

15 {

16 if (top == MAX-1)

17 {

18 printf("Stack is full cannot push more elements.");

19 return;

20 }

21 s[++top] = value;

22 }

23

24 /** Pop the top element from stack and returns it. If stack is empty return -1.

25 */

26 int pop()
27 {

28 if (top == -1)

29 {

30 printf("Empty Stack. Nothing to return.");

31 return -1;

32 }

33 return s[top--];

34 }

35 /** returns true if stack is empty, else false.

36 */

37 bool isEmpty()

38 {

39 return (top == -1);

40 }

Understanding above code

Above code is in way a good code. There are lot of problems, to start with pop

returns -1 when stack is empty which means that -1 cannot be a valid member of

the stack.

Push function should ideally return something to tell its calling function whether or

not it was able to insert element in the stack. printf is not a good way in production

code, because most often it ends up printing in logs.


The size of Array is 100, if we just need 10 element stack, then 90 element

memory will be wasted. In other case, if we want a stack with 500 element, we will

have to change MAX value, which means program need to be compiled again. The

solution to this can be to get the size of stack from the calling function and allocate

memory using malloc (or new in C++). But then we should be cautious about

deallocating memory when done, else it will leave memory leaks.

Time Complexity

All the above operations are constant time operations and takes O(1) time. In fact,

almost all the operations of Stack and Queue are constant time operations, except

for operations like printing all elements, etc.

Source: http://www.ritambhara.in/array-implementation-of-stack/

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