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

19

Containers and Iterators

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. Except, of course, the problem of too many indirections.

– David J. Wheeler

This chapter and the next two present the STL, the containers and algorithms part of the C++ standard library. The STL is an extensible framework for dealing with data in a C++ program. After a first simple example, we present the general ideals and the fundamental concepts. We discuss iteration, linked-list manipulation, and STL containers. The key notions of sequence and iterator are used to tie containers (data) together with algorithms (processing). This chapter lays the groundwork for the general, efficient, and useful algorithms presented in Chapter 21