Generic programming: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:49, 28 December 2004

Revision as of 03:57, 10 January 2005

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Templates are of great utility to programmers in C++, especially when combined with multiple [[Inheritance in object-oriented programming|inheritance]] and [[operator overloading]]. The C++ [[Standard Template Library]] (STL) provides many useful functions within a framework of connected templates.

As the templates in C++ are very expressive they may be used for things other than generic programming. One such use is called [[template metaprogramming]], which is a way of pre-evalutingevaluating some of the code at compile-time rather than run-time. Further discussion here only relates to templates as a method of generic programming.

===Technical overview===