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In C++, associative containers are a group of class templates in the standard library of the C++ programming language that implement ordered associative arrays. [1] Being templates , they can be used to store arbitrary elements, such as integers or custom classes.
The C++ language makes wide use of iterators in its Standard Library and describes several categories of iterators differing in the repertoire of operations they allow. These include forward iterators, bidirectional iterators, and random access iterators, in order of increasing possibilities. All of the standard container template types provide ...
For example, a vector would have a random-access iterator, but a list only a bidirectional iterator. Iterators are the major feature that allow the generality of the STL. For example, an algorithm to reverse a sequence can be implemented using bidirectional iterators, and then the same implementation can be used on lists, vectors and deques.
In C++, a class can overload all of the pointer operations, so an iterator can be implemented that acts more or less like a pointer, complete with dereference, increment, and decrement. This has the advantage that C++ algorithms such as std::sort can immediately be applied to plain old memory buffers, and that there is no new syntax to learn.
Moreover, C++11 allows foreach loops to be applied to any class that provides the begin and end functions. It's then possible to write generator-like classes by defining both the iterable methods (begin and end) and the iterator methods (operator!=, operator++ and operator*) in the same class. For example, it is possible to write the following ...
Due to their usefulness, they were later included in several other implementations of the C++ Standard Library (e.g., the GNU Compiler Collection's (GCC) libstdc++ [2] and the Visual C++ (MSVC) standard library). The hash_* class templates were proposed into C++ Technical Report 1 (C++ TR1) and were accepted under names unordered_*. [3]
It should be possible to define a new operation for (some) classes of an object structure without changing the classes. When new operations are needed frequently and the object structure consists of many unrelated classes, it's inflexible to add new subclasses each time a new operation is required because "[..] distributing all these operations across the various node classes leads to a system ...
The C++ Standard Library underwent ISO standardization as part of the C++ ISO Standardization effort in the 1990s. Since 2011, it has been expanded and updated every three years [8] with each revision of the C++ standard. Since C++23, the C++ Standard Library can be imported using modules, which were introduced in C++20.