In article okc@steel.interlog.com, dgenn@interlog.com (Dan Gennidakis) writes:
>Can anyone describe what stl is for me and the benefits or ramifications of
>using it.Is this going to be part of the C++ standard and why?

STL is an extensible library of algorithms and data structures.  It has been
adopted by the ANSI/ISO committee and will be part of the C++ standard.

You ask "why".  Well, historically there has been no de-facto standard for
C++ container classes.  Typically, each compiler vendor provided their own.
I have access to four different C++ compilers.  All of them come with basically
the same iostream interfaces, but totally different linked list classes.  This
means that any code I write that depends on one implemenation's linked list class
is not portable to any other implementation.  Of course, I can write my own linked
list class, but why should I do that?  Linked lists are a well-understood concept
and should be available as a standard, reusable, universlly-available component.

The fact that C++ lacked standard "container classes" was perceived to be
a deficiency by many members of the ANSI/ISO committee, and STL ("Standard
Template Library") was adopted to address that deficiency.  The ramifications
for you, as a C++ programmer, are that every major C++ compiler will include
an STL implementation in the near future, and I suspect that components based
on the STL paradigm will soon become widely available.  As a consequence, if
you are a serious C++ programmer, you will probably be an STL user (whether
you like it or not--but, as it happens, I think you'll like it).

Fairly detailed information about STL is available at two FTP sites (that I
know of): butler.hpl.hp.com and ftp.cs.rpi.edu.  At both sites, the stl is
found in /pub/stl (or something like that).  Both sites have a freely-redis-
tributable version of the STL source code and some additional documentation
as well.

Happy hunting.



---
Marc Shepherd
Salomon Brothers Inc
mshepherd@mhfl.sbi.com  The opinions I express are no one's but mine!

Can anyone describe what stl is for me and the benefits or ramifications of
using it.Is this going to be part of the C++ standard and why?