Introduction

In this chapter, we discuss one of C++'s more powerful software reuse features, namely templates. Function templates and class templates enable programmers to specify, with a single code segment, an entire range of related (overloaded) functionscalled function-template specializationsor an entire range of related classescalled class-template specializations. This technique is called generic programming.

We might write a single function template for an array-sort function, then have C++ generate separate function-template specializations that will sort int arrays, float arrays, string arrays and so on. We introduced function templates in Chapter 6. We present an additional discussion and example in this chapter.

We might write a single class template for a stack class, then have C++ generate separate class-template specializations, such as a stack-of-int class, a stack-of-float class, a stack-of-string class and so on.

Note the distinction between templates and template specializations: Function templates and class templates are like stencils out of which we trace shapes; function-template specializations and class-template specializations are like the separate tracings that all have the same shape, but could, for example, be drawn in different colors.

In this chapter, we present a function template and a class template. We also consider the relationships between templates and other C++ features, such as overloading, inheritance, friends and static members. The design and details of the template mechanisms discussed here are based on the work of Bjarne Stroustrup as presented in his paper, Parameterized Types for C++, and as published in the Proceedings of the USENIX C++ Conference held in Denver, Colorado, in October 1988.

This chapter is only an introduction to templates. Chapter 23, Standard Template Library (STL), presents an in-depth treatment of the template container classes, iterators and algorithms of the STL. Chapter 23 contains dozens of live-code template-based examples illustrating more sophisticated template-programming techniques than those used here.

Software Engineering Observation 14.1

Most C++ compilers require the complete definition of a template to appear in the client source-code file that uses the template. For this reason and for reusability, templates are often defined in header files, which are then #included into the appropriate client source-code files. For class templates, this means that the member functions are also defined in the header file.