Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, 3rd Edition

18

Templates and Exceptions

Success is never final.

– Winston Churchill

This chapter completes the design and implementation of the most common and most useful STL container: vector. We show how to specify containers where the element type is a parameter and how to deal with range errors. As usual, the techniques used are generally applicable, rather than simply restricted to the implementation of vector, or even to the implementation of containers. The techniques rely on templates and exceptions, so we show how to define templates and give the basic techniques for resource management that are the keys to good use of exceptions. In this context, we discuss the general resource-management technique called “Resource Acquisition is Initialization” ...