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Fee FIFO fun

Several of you write demanding a final word on the practicality of FIFO stacks of concrete slabs, queues, or whatever you want to call them. To paraphrase Ant and Dec on Britain’s Got Talent, in the smoking areas outside the UK’s IT departments, people are talking about little else.
‘A FIFO stack of paving slabs works fine provided the slabs are stacked standing on end,’ says Michael Aspaturian at British Energy. ‘Perhaps a bit unstable, but so are most FIFO stacks. The plastic cup dispenser in a coffee machine is also FIFO stack: you load from the top, remove from the bottom.’
Paul Ireland at UX Online says: ‘Stack them vertically and you have a FILO queue, but stack them horizontally on their edges and you can easily remove the first one. Perhaps we should use a different nomenclature for queues or stacks to make their function clearer to all: horizontal and vertical.’
We’d love to say that was the last word, but we suspect it isn’t.

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