C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

10.2.3. Algorithms That Reorder Container Elements

Some algorithms rearrange the order of elements within a container. An obvious example of such an algorithm is sort. A call to sort arranges the elements in the input range into sorted order using the element type’s < operator.

As an example, suppose we want to analyze the words used in a set of children’s stories. We’ll assume that we have a vector that holds the text of several stories. We’d like to reduce this vector so that each word appears only once, regardless of how many times that word appears in any of the given stories.

For purposes of illustration, we’ll use the following simple story ...