C++ Primer Plus

Template Specializations

Class templates are like function templates in that you can have implicit instantiations, explicit instantiations, and explicit specializations, collectively known as specializations. That is, a template describes a class in terms of a general type, whereas a specialization is a class declaration generated by using a specific type.

Implicit Instantiations

The template examples you have seen so far in this chapter use implicit instantiations. That is, they declare one or more objects indicating the desired type, and the compiler generates a specialized class definition, using the recipe provided by the general template:

ArrayTP<int, 100> stuff; // implicit instantiation

The compiler doesn’t generate an implicit instantiation ...