Using the STL

Programming languages evolve in steps. They began with weakly typed lan­ guages like FORTRAN and progressed to strongly typed languages like PAS­ CAL. This had the positive effect of moving the detection of many programming errors from run-time to compile-time. Unfortunately, it was soon recognized that it had the negative effect of limiting the generality of functions since they were now bound to a specific data type. This virtually eliminated the writing of reusable software components. The re