The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference

Chapter 10. Special Containers

The C++ standard library provides not only the containers for the STL framework, but also some containers that fit some special needs and provide simple, almost self-explanatory interfaces. You can group these containers into

• The so-called container adapters

  These containers adapt standard STL containers to fit special needs. There are three standard container adapters:

  1. Stacks

  2. Queues

  3. Priority queues

  Priority queues are queues in which the elements are sorted automatically according to a sorting criterion. Thus, the "next" element of a priority queue is the element with the "highest" value.

• A special container, called a bitset

  A bitset is a bitfield with an arbitrary but fixed number of bits. You can consider it a container ...