Generic Programming
Now that you have some experience using the STL, let's look at the underlying philosophy. The STL is an example of generic programming. Object-oriented programming concentrates on the data aspect of programming, while generic programming concentrates on algorithms. The main things the two approaches have in common are abstraction and the creation of reusable code, but the philosophies are quite different
A goal of generic programming is to write code that is independent of data types. Templates are the C++ tools for doing generic programs. Templates, of course, let you define a function or class in terms of a generic type. The STL goes further by providing a generic representation of algorithms. Templates make this possible, ...
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