Foreword to STL Tutorial and Reference Guide, Second Edition C++ …

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STL was not designed to be a part of the C++ Standard Li- … iterators and containers, are not describable in C++ since STL depends on …

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Foreword
When Dave Musser asked me to write an extended foreword to the second
edition of this book, I jumped on the opportunity. First, Dave is my closest
professional friend; we have been collaborating for over 20 years, and without
Dave there would be no STL. So honoring his request is by itself a privilege.
It also gives me an opportunity to say a few words about what I had in mind
while designing STL.
To use a tool, it is useful to understand not just the instructions for
using it but also the principles that guided its designers. The main goal of
this foreword is to present you with the principles behind STL. I’ll conclude
with some musings.
STL was designed with four fundamental ideas in mind:
2 Abstractness
2 Efficiency
2 Von Neumann computational model
2 Value semantics
Abstractness. Some of you might have heard that STL is an example of
a programming technique called “generic programming.” This is so. Some
of you might have also heard that generic programming is a style of programming
using C++ templates. This is not so. Generic programming has
nothing to do with C++ or templates. Generic programming is a discipline…