Containers in C++
A class with the main purpose of holding objects is commonly called a container. Providing suitable containers for a given task and supporting them with useful fundamental operations are important steps in the construction of any program.
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
It was new. It was singular. It was simple.
It must succeed!
– H. Nelson
Introduction
vector
Elements; Range Checking
list
forward_list
map
unordered_map
Allocators
Container Overview
Advice
12.1 Introduction
Most computing involves creating collections of values and then manipulating such collections. Reading characters into a string and printing out the string is a simple example. A class with the main purpose of holding objects is commonly called a container. Providing suitable containers for a given task and supporting them with useful fundamental operations are important steps in the construction of any program.
To illustrate the standard-library containers, consider a simple program for keeping names and telephone numbers. This is the kind of program for which different approaches appear “simple and obvious” to people of different backgrounds. The Entry class from §11.5 can be used to hold a simple phone book entry. Here, we deliberately ignore many real-world complexities, such as the fact that many phone numbers do not have a simple representation as a 32-bit int.