Understanding the STL
Let's admit it: I am an old fool.
I started
C++ in 1990, back when CFront was state of the art - but soon learnt as a young man that
templates are something better to be avoided. I tried them when they were the new kids on the block,
and ran into horrible code sizes (this was in a period of time when computers had RAM measured in KBytes) and
error messages to boggle the mind. Plus, being an old assembler hacker, I loved macros, and who would be stupid
enough to give up on macros for completely unreliable inline (back then typically ignored by compilers) code with
a crippled feature set? No sir,
I am not a masochist!
Old habits die hard, so fast forward 20 years to 2010 and there I was, am still not using any templates,
or STL, or horrible nightmares like boost.
But with all the excitement about C++11 (and 14, and 17), last year I started reading books on C++ again (a little bit late, I admit), and in my old age have come to see templates a little bit more relaxed. And then... I was unfortunate enough to look into the STL to find out what was going on in a particular case, and found myself in good company: questioning the readability of the STL code. So I decided to waste my time and start a line-by-line discussion of the STL code, to see how much I can understand about it.
So now about the fool part of I am an old fool. Since I didn't know where to start,
I decided to start with std::pair, because seriously, what could be more simple than that?
And, to boot, I used the Microsoft implementation (in particular the one from Visual Studio 2013), because
that is the compiler I use at work. Without further ado: