C++ Primer Plus

Things to Do to Vectors

Besides allocating storage, what else can the vector template do for you? All the STL containers provide certain basic methods, including size(), which returns the number of elements in a container, swap(), which exchanges the contents of two containers, begin(), which returns an iterator that refers to the first element in a container, and end(), which returns an iterator that represents past-the-end for the container.

What’s an iterator? It’s a generalization of a pointer. In fact, it can be a pointer. Or it can be an object for which pointer-like operations such as dereferencing (for example, operator*()) and incrementing (for example, operator++()) have been defined. As you’ll see later, generalizing pointers to iterators ...