Eli5-What does a “stack overflow” mean?
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When a program jumps from one section of code to another, it might have to save some information, (like where to come back to) in memory (RAM). If this code jumps to another bit of code, it may have to save more information, too. This data is sequential in memory, much like a stack of boxes, hence the name.
Typically, the code should not jump too many times, so there is usually no problem. But if there was an error in the writing of the program, there might be so many jumps that the stack uses up all the available memory. This is an error message a programmer would see frequently while writing code, and know what to do to fix it. It just became a cool name for a website for fixing code, because everyone using that site would have seen it before.
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