C++ In a Nutshell

Overview of Templates

A template declaration can be a function declaration, function definition, class declaration, or class definition. The template declaration takes one or more parameters, which can be values, types, or class templates.

In most cases, you can use a template simply by naming the template and providing arguments for the template parameters: constant expressions, types, or template references. This is known as instantiating the template. You can instantiate a template at its point of use, or declare a separate instantiation as a class or function declaration. An instance of a function template creates a function; an instance of a class template creates a class and all of its members.

A template lets you define a class or function once for a wide range of template arguments, but sometimes you need to customize a template for particular arguments. This is known as specializing the template. A template specialization, as its name implies, is a special case of the template pattern. When you instantiate a template, the compiler uses the template arguments to pick a specialization, or if no specialization matches the arguments, the original template declaration. A specialization can be total or partial. A total specialization specifies values for all of the template arguments, and a partial specialization specifies only some of the template arguments.

The terminology used in this book reflects the terminology that many C++ programmers have adopted, even though that terminology ...