C++: A Dialog Programming with the C++ Standard Library

Adding Further Facilities to our string class

At this point, we have a fairly minimal string class. We can create a string, assign it a literal value in the form of a C string literal, and copy the value of one string to another; we can even pass a string as a value argument. Now we'll use our existing techniques along with some new ones to improve the facilities that the string class provides.

To make this goal more concrete, let's suppose that we want to modify the sorting program of Chapter 4 to sort strings, rather than shorts. To use the sorting algorithm from that program, we'll need to be able to compare two strings to see which would come after the other in the dictionary, as we can compare two shorts to see which is greater. We also ...