Why stack in convex hull

Question

I was reserarching about Convex hull and Graham Scan to implement it and It drew my attention that everyone has used stacks. So I wanted to ask why are the stacks used in the algoithm precisely, what's the benefit of using stacks?

Answer 1

The stack here can be considered as an abstract data structure that supports push, pop and empty operations. If you read the description of the Graham Scan algorithm you'll see that these are exactly the operations which the algorithm uses, so I really can't see what could be an alternative to a stack - it would probably be a different algorithm then.

What data structure is used to back/implement these operations in the stack (i. e. the class that implements stack interface in OO terms) can be decided rather freely. Often an array is used, but for some applications also linked lists might make sense.