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Book Info
Explains the central ideas underlying generic programming - concepts, modeling & refinement & shows how these ideas lead to the fundamental concepts of the STL; iterators, containers, & function objects. DLC: C++ (Computer program language).
From the Inside Flap
Explains the central ideas underlying generic programming - concepts, modeling & refinement & shows how these ideas lead to the fundamental concepts of the STL; iterators, containers, & function objects. DLC: C++ (Computer program language).
From the Inside Flap
This is not a book about object-oriented programming.
You may think that's odd. You probably found this book in the C++ section of the bookstore, after all, and you've probably heard people use object oriented and C++ synonymously, but that isn't the only way to use the C++ language. C++ supports several fundamentally different paradigms, the newest and least familiar of which is generic programming.
Like most new ideas, generic programming actually has a long history. Some of the early research papers on generic programming are nearly 25 years old, and the first experimental generic libraries were written not in C++ but in Ada MS89a, MS89b and Scheme KMS88. Yet generic programming is new enough that no textbooks on the subject exist.
The first example of generic programming to become important outside of research groups was the STL, the C++ Standard Template Library. The Standard Template Library, designed by Alexander Stepanov (then of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories) and Meng Lee, was accepted in 1994 as part of the C++ standard library. The freely available "HP implementation" SL95, which served as a demonstration of the STL's capabilities, was released the same year.
When the Standard Template Library first became part of the C++ standard, the C++ community immediately recognized it as a library of high-quality and efficient container classes. It is always easiest to see what is familiar, and every C++ programmer is familiar with container classes. Every nontrivial program requires some way of managing a collection of objects, and every C++ programmer has written a class that implements strings or vectors or lists.
Container class libraries have been available since the earliest days of C++, and when "template" classes (parameterized types) were added to the language, one of their first uses--indeed, one of the main reasons that templates were introduced--was parameterized container classes. Many different vendors, including Borland, Microsoft, Rogue Wave, and IBM, wrote their own libraries that included Array <T> or its equivalent.
The fact that container classes are so familiar made the STL seem at first to be nothing more than yet another container class library. This familiarity diverted attention from the ways in which the STL was unique.
The STL is a large and extensible body of efficient, generic, and interoperable software components. It includes many of the basic algorithms and data structures of computer science, and it is written so that algorithms and data structures are decou