caelumvox - building on a cloud

"At some point you have to stop introducing features and focus on the details. Otherwise, you never finish the work." - Nicolai Josuttis Key points throughout these sections: - The C++ standard template library containers were designed with value semantics in mind. It is also not possible to store auto_ptrs in the containers due to the effect of the assignment operator. For reference semantics, the Boost pointer array should come in handy. - The STL was also designed for performance rather than safety. There are some containers that throw exceptions, but not many. The burden of safety falls on the code that uses the STL. - There are sequential containers and associative containers. Which container to use depends on the behavior of the software because containers behavior differently. - Associative containers are represented internally by binary (Red-Black) trees. - Container traversal must be done through iterators. Iterators have their own hierarchy of traits: i...