Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

THE RANGE OF STL CONTAINERS

The STL provides templates for a variety of container classes that you can use in a wide range of application contexts. Sequence containers are containers in which you store objects of a given type in a linear fashion, either as a dynamic array or as a list. Elements are retrieved based on their position in the container. Associative containers store objects based on a key that you supply with each object to be stored; the key is used to locate the object within the container. In a typical application, you might be storing phone numbers in an associative container, using names as the keys. This would enable you to retrieve a particular number from the container just by supplying the appropriate name. Sets are containers that hold elements that are stored and retrieved based on the elements themselves. They can be unordered, rather like objects rattling around in a bag, or they can be ordered. There are also sets that allow you to specify a comparator that will establish a particular order within the set. I won’t be discussing sets in detail. I’ll first introduce you to sequence containers, and then I’ll delve into associative containers and what you can do with them.