Книга: Standard Template Library Programmer

Concepts and Modeling

Concepts and Modeling

One very important question to ask about any template function, not just about STL algorithms, is what the set of types is that may correctly be substituted for the formal template parameters. Clearly, for example, int* or double* may be substituted for find 's formal template parameter InputIterator . Equally clearly, int or double may not: find uses the expression *first , and the dereference operator makes no sense for an object of type int or of type double . The basic answer, then, is that find implicitly defines a set of requirements on types, and that it may be instantiated with any type that satisfies those requirements. Whatever type is substituted for InputIterator must provide certain operations: it must be possible to compare two objects of that type for equality, it must be possible to increment an object of that type, it must be possible to dereference an object of that type to obtain the object that it points to, and so on.

Find isn't the only STL algorithm that has such a set of requirements; the arguments to for_each and count, and other algorithms, must satisfy the same requirements. These requirements are sufficiently important that we give them a name: we call such a set of type requirements a concept , and we call this particular concept Input Iterator. we say that a type conforms to a concept , or that it is a model of a concept , if it satisfies all of those requirements. We say that int* is a model of Input Iterator because int* provides all of the operations that are specified by the Input Iterator requirements.

Concepts are not a part of the C++ language; there is no way to declare a concept in a program, or to declare that a particular type is a model of a concept. Nevertheless, concepts are an extremely important part of the STL. Using concepts makes it possible to write programs that cleanly separate interface from implementation: the author of find only has to consider the interface specified by the concept Input Iterator, rather than the implementation of every possible type that conforms to that concept. Similarly, if you want to use find , you need only to ensure that the arguments you pass to it are models of Input Iterator.this is the reason why find and reverse can be used with list s, vector s, C arrays, and many other types: programming in terms of concepts, rather than in terms of specific types, makes it possible to reuse software components and to combine components together.

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