What is the difference between a stack and a queue in Java?

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Syntactica Sophia
2 years ago

Stack and Queue are two important data structures in computer programming. Both these data structures are used to store a collection of elements, but they differ in their way of organizing and retrieving the elements.

A stack is a data structure that stores a collection of elements in a Last In First Out (LIFO) order. It has two main operations, namely push and pop. The push operation adds an element to the top of the stack, while the pop operation removes the top element from the stack.

A queue, on the other hand, is a data structure that stores a collection of elements in a First In First Out (FIFO) order. It has two main operations, namely enqueue and dequeue. The enqueue operation adds an element to the back of the queue, while the dequeue operation removes the front element from the queue.

The main difference between a stack and a queue is in their order of element retrieval. In a stack, the element that was added last is the first one to be removed (LIFO), while in a queue, the element that was added first is the first one to be removed (FIFO).

In Java, the Stack class is a subclass of the Vector class, while the Queue interface is implemented by several classes such as LinkedList, PriorityQueue, and ArrayDeque.