Chapter 9 Overview

In many problem situations, a programmer needs the ability to define a group of objects as either a one-dimensional or multidimensional list. For such tasks, C++ provides two representation alternatives. One representation is based on arrays; the other representation is based on classes. The array representation is the traditional one and remains important because many legacy libraries work only with this form of list. However, C++ imposes significant restrictions on the use of arrays in an effort to maintain backward compatibility with C. In part because of these restrictions and in part because of software-engineering reasons, arrays are becoming less popular and class representations of lists are becoming the dominant list representation. Several class representations for lists are defined in the Standard Template Library (STL). These classes are known as container classes because their objects can hold multiple values, and the most important container class is the vector class. Our list examination considers how to define and manipulate both array and vector objects.

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