Advantages of circular queue over stack in java

Question

I was asked the advantages of using circular queue over stack. I couldn't think of any. Searching the internet doesn't give clear answer. Is there any other advantage?

Answer 1

Perhaps you're missing the obvious here - forgetting the 'circular' part, what's the advantage of a queue over stack? Well, one's a queue , ie FIFO semantics, and the other's a stack , ie LIFO semantics.

The advantage of a queue over a stack is that you process items in order. If you know you can process an item in a particular amount of time then you can calculate a throughput and that can give you a rough estimate of how long an item will be in the queue before it's processed.

Queue's are often implemented as circular lists. They don't have to be.