C++ Primer Plus

Using a Template Class

Merely including a template in a program doesn’t generate a template class. You have to ask for an instantiation. To do this, you declare an object of the template class type, replacing the generic type name with the particular type you want. For example, here’s how you would create two stacks, one for stacking ints and one for stacking string objects:

Stack<int> kernels;      // create a stack of intsStack<string> colonels;  // create a stack of string objects

Seeing these two declarations, the compiler will follow the Stack<Type> template to generate two separate class declarations and two separate sets of class methods. The Stack<int> class declaration will replace Type throughout with int, and the Stack<string> class ...