Eli5-What does a “stack overflow” mean?

Question

Eli5-What does a “stack overflow” mean?

In: 847

Answer 1

You can think of it like an actual stack of index cards. Let’s say you’re doing some really hard math problem. You might want to do a small chunk of it separately to simplify things, so you grab a new index card, stack it on top of the first one, and do your smaller calculation there. From there, you can copy the result back over to the index card on the bottom. Of course, that second index card of calculations can also be really complex and require an index card of its own. Stack overflow errors happen when you run out of space to stack more index cards onto the pile.