C++ Primer Plus

Why Iterators?

Understanding iterators is perhaps the key to understanding the STL. Just as templates make algorithms independent of the type of data stored, iterators make the algorithms independent of the type of container used. Thus, they are an essential component of the STL’s generic approach.

To see why iterators are needed, let’s look at how you might implement a find function for two different data representations and then see how you could generalize the approach. First, let’s consider a function that searches an ordinary array of double for a particular value. You could write the function like this:

double * find_ar(double * ar, int n, const double & val){    for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)        if (ar[i] == val)            return &ar[i]; ...