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Re: I don't get some aspects of STL ... [pointless rant] [message #21283 is a reply to message #20441]

Mon, 11 May 2009 16:28

piotr5
Messages: 107
Registered: November 2005

Experienced Member

I see stl less as a library than as a standard. usually the containers of stl are absolutely useless for me and I need to write my own. the way I do this is to just copy some container from the header-files of stl and modify it along my own wishes. for example a graph-container could be created by reusing the list-container code. another interesting aspect of stl is that quite useless algorithms are implemented in stl on a template-basis -- if you know a better implementation for some particular case you can always write it as a specialization, people will understand your code because you used exactly the same function-name as in stl. finally the strange choice to return the end-iterator after whatever operation is also an example for setting up a standard: there are oftentimes cases with 2 or more possibilities for an interface, stl does tell us which to chose such that other people reading the sources wont be confused. but I agree, as a library stl certainly is just the last ressort when nothing else exists...

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