C++ By Example: UnderC Learning Edition

Containers

Arrays have several disadvantages. Earlier in this chapter we discussed their lack of size information, which means you must use two arguments to pass an array to a function. It also means that you cannot check an array index at runtime to see whether it's out of bounds. It is easy to crash a program by using the wrong index; what is perhaps worse—because the program seems to work—is that memory can be silently overwritten. All C programmers will tell you that these are some of the worst bugs to solve. Built-in arrays are also inflexible in that they have a fixed size that must be a constant. Although it is very fast to access array data randomly, insertions and deletions are slow.

The standard library defines a number of container ...