Re: Documentation for libstdc++

[Ingo Krabbe <ikrabbe at earthling dot net>]

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Aaron Birenboim wrote:

> I have not been able to find typical "refrence" documentation
> for the classes (and descriptions of the actions of their members)
> in libstdc++.  Only meta-documentation about how it compares
> to some C++ library standard or MFC.
>
> Where can I get a typical programmer's refrence document
> for the classes provided by libstdc++ and/or the standard
> class libraries on which it is based?
>
> Do I have to get the ISO document?
> I hope not.  The standards docs usually make
> poor users refrences.
>
> All I'm looking for are things like...
> What do all those member functions of string do?
> How can I make an Array or linked list of strings?
> Given some sort of Array or LinkedList template, how
> to I access the members of an Array<string>?
>
> Any pointers are appreciated.
> --
> Aaron Birenboim | Black holes are where G-d divided
> Albuquerque, NM |      by zero.
> aaron@boim.com  |
> boim.com/~aaron |                      -Steven Wright
>

I haven't found a real standard conforming online document. It may be that
an author like Stroustrup has written a reference book and distributes it
in electronic form. With a Sun's SC5.0 there comes a quite good reference
but its confusing too because of the many possible cases, which occure by
porting old software. In the past there were a nice document at the SGI
server about STL, but it was only a description of their library, which
was quite nice.

For the last two years I worked with the pre release ISO document. Ok,
thats no documentation, if you really ask yourself how to do some things
it might be better to buy a book. At least for the cutting edges of
template programming I don't think that you find anything which really
helps you working around the ISO document. Its all a question of
definition.

Using containers is quite conformant and the easiest way may be to look
into some Header files. An Array<xyz> is called vector of course and a
list is doubly linked and is really called 'list'. The main operations for
container element access are insert( iterator prev, const T& obj ) and
read access is controled via iterators.

By the way, the whole library is really consistent but not really usefull
though. After 5 years of experiments with C++ I switched back to plain C
which enables me to write real code again ;->

CU INGO