C++ Standard Library, The: A Tutorial and Reference, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. 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 either the so-called container adapters, which adapt standard STL containers to fit special needs, or a bitset, which is a containers for bits or Boolean values.

There are three standard container adapters: stacks, queues, and priority queues. In priority queues, 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 bitset is a bitfield with an arbitrary but fixed number of bits. Note that ...