Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

WHAT IS THE STANDARD TEMPLATE LIBRARY?

As its name implies, the Standard Template Library is a library of standard class and function templates. You can use these templates to create a wide range of powerful general-purpose classes for organizing your data, as well as functions for processing that data in various ways. The STL is defined by the standard for C++ and is therefore always available with a conforming compiler. Because of its broad applicability, the STL can greatly simplify programming in many of your applications.

I’ll first explain, in general terms, the kinds of resources the STL provides and how they interact with one another, before diving into the details of working examples. The STL contains six kinds of components: containers, container adapters, iterators, algorithms, function objects, and function adapters. Because they are part of the standard library, the names of the STL components are all defined within the std namespace.

The STL is a very large library, some of which is highly specialized, and to cover the contents fully would require a book in its own right. In this chapter, I’ll introduce the fundamentals of how you use the STL and describe the more commonly used capabilities. Let’s start with containers.

Containers

Containers are objects that you use to store and organize other objects. A class that implements a linked list is an example of a container. You create a container class from an STL template by supplying the type of the object that you intend ...