C++ Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

Algorithms

The STL contains many non-member functions for working with containers. You've seen a few of them already: sort(), copy(), find(), for_each(), random_shuffle(), set_union(), set_intersection(), set_difference(), and transform(). You've probably noticed they feature the same overall design, using iterators to identify data ranges to be processed and to identify where results are to go. Some also take a function object argument to be used as part of the data processing.

There are two main generic components to the algorithm function designs. First, they use templates to provide generic types. Second, they use iterators to provide a generic representation for accessing data in a container. Thus, the copy() function can work with a container ...