STL Pocket Reference

Introduction

STL Pocket Reference is a quick reference to the Standard Template Library portion of the standard C++ library, as documented in ISO/IEC 14882:2003(E), Programming Languages—C++, which is the original 1998 standard plus the corrections and additions in Technical Corrigendum 1.

The name Standard Template Library (STL) does not appear in the C++ standard, and the STL is not a formal part of the standard. Instead, the term STL usually refers to that part of the standard library that owes its heritage to the original STL, written by Alexander Stepanov, David Musser, and Meng Lee of Hewlett-Packard in the early 1990s, based on earlier work in Ada. Their innovative library of generic algorithms, iterators, and containers was quickly adopted as part of the C++ standard. The templates that were once the STL evolved and changed as the standard moved toward completion in 1998. Some other parts of the library, such as the basic_string class template, were changed to be more container-like, even though they were not part of the original STL.

This book describes what the STL has become: the algorithms, iterators, and containers in the standard C++ library, plus other relevant bits and pieces. For example, bitset<> is not a standard container, but it is included because the standard lists it in the same section as the containers and because it is useful.

The last section in this book discusses the Boost project, which is not part of the C++ standard library but is important for all ...