Addison.Wesley.Designing.Components with the C++ STL.pdf

This electronic edition is available only as a pdf-ﬁle. It is a revised and improved

version of the book mentioned in the copyright notice below.

This material is made available by Pearson Education Ltd in electronic form

subject to the condition that the material nor any part of the material may not

be copied, printed, downloaded, saved or transferred to any other computer ﬁle,

or distributed on a network. This material ﬁrst appeared in Ulrich Breymann,

Designing Components with the C++ STL, ISBN 0 201 67488 2, c Pearson

Education Limited 2000, published by Pearson Education Ltd.

Ulrich Breymann

Designing Components with the C++ STL

revised edition

Date of print: September 22, 2002

for Lena, Niko and Anne

Foreword

Ironically, it was in Waterloo that the STL was adopted as part of the ISO/ANSI Stan-

dard C++ Library, and from that day on it went onto a triumphal march. Alexander

Stepanov and Meng Lee had proposed the result of years of research at Hewlett-

Packard, a standard template library, to the standards committee. The committee

gracefully adopted the STL as part of the C++ Standard at a committee meeting in

Waterloo in the summer of 1994, after countless controversial discussions and much

work spent by committee members on making the STL ﬁt for a standard. Most

importantly, the adoption was tied to the condition that the source code had to be

made publicly available. Since then the STL has become more and more popular in

the C++ community and conquered the hearts of quite a number of programmers.

Personally, I know of software developers who cannot imagine getting their work

done anymore without a general-purpose library like the STL. Obviously, not all

Waterloos are the same. This Waterloo was in Ontario – seemingly a good omen.

Much of the merit, however, is not seriously due to picking the right location

for presenting a library. The STL is an invaluable foundation library that makes

programmers more productive in two ways. It contains a lot of different components

that can be plugged together, so it provides a ﬂexible and extensible framework.

Plus, it has an elegant, consistent, and easy to comprehend architecture.

When Ulrich asked me in fall 1995 whether I would feel like writing this book

with him, my ﬁrst thought was: Does the world really need another STL book?

Three books had already been out at that point in time; I had volunteered for writing

a regular column about the STL for a magazine of high renown like C++ Report ; nu-

merous conference organizers invited me to speak about the STL; even my employer

had me prepare and conduct courses on the STL. In sum, there were countless re-

sources available to meet the growing interest in the C++ community. I simply ques-

tioned the need for yet another STL tutorial. About a year later, I held the German

edition of his book in my hands, skimmed through the pages, and started reading –

with increasing enjoyment. And I must admit, he convinced me. This book goes

beyond the tutorials I had seen up to then and has an approach and appeal of its own:

it explains techniques for building your own data structures and algorithms on top of

the STL and this way appreciates the STL for what it is – a framework. I had been

looking for this aspect in tutorials, often in vain.

As can be expected, the book starts off with an introduction to the STL. Already

the initial explanations provide you with insights into the internals of the STL that

you miss in other introductory material. For instance, Ulrich explains what the im-

plementation of an iterator typically looks like. This kind of information is profound

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