Professional C++, 6th Edition

CStandard Library Header Files

The interface to the C++23 Standard Library consists of 107 header files, 21 of which present the C Standard Library. Starting with C++23, you simply import the named module std to get access to the entire Standard Library, as has been done in all examples throughout this book. There is no longer a need to explicitly import or include individual header files, except for certain non-importable header files, such as <cassert>. However, if your compiler does not yet support the C++23 std named module, then you need to import or include the appropriate header files. In that case, it's often difficult to remember which header files you need to include in your source code, so this appendix provides a brief description of the most useful functionality of each header, organized into eight categories:

• The C Standard Library
• Containers
• Algorithms, iterators, ranges, and allocators
• General utilities
• Mathematical utilities
• Exceptions
• I/O streams
• Threading support library

THE C STANDARD LIBRARY

The C++ Standard Library includes almost the entire C Standard Library. The header files are generally the same, except for these two points:

• The header names are <cname> instead of <name.h>.
• All the names declared in the <cname> header files are in the std namespace.

NOTE You can still include <name.h> if you want, but that puts the names into the global namespace instead of the std namespace. Additionally, up until C++23, the use of <name.h> C Standard ...