Chapter 12. Specialization and Overloading

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So far we have studied how C++ templates allow a generic definition to be expanded into a family of related classes or functions. Although this is a powerful mechanism, there are many situations in which the generic form of an operation is far from optimal for a specific substitution of template parameters.

C++ is somewhat unique among other popular programming languages with support for generic programming because it has a rich set of features that enable the transparent replacement of a generic definition by a more specialized facility. In this chapter we study the two C++ language mechanisms that allow pragmatic deviations from pure genericness: template specialization and overloading of function templates.

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