A Tour of C++, 3rd Edition

15

Pointers and Containers

Education is what, when, and why to do things.

Training is how to do it.

– Richard Hamming

• Introduction

• Pointers

  unique_ptr and shared_ptr; span

• Containers

  array; bitset; pair; tuple

• Alternatives

  variant; optional; any

• Advice

15.1 Introduction

C++ offers simple built-in low-level types to hold and refer to data: objects and arrays hold data; pointers and arrays refer to such data. However, we need to support both more specialized and more general ways for holding and using data. For example, the standard-library containers (Chapter 12) and iterators (§13.3) are designed to support general algorithms.

The main commonality among the container and pointer abstractions is that their correct and efficient use requires ...