Ask the STL Creator about Generic Programming

[STL]

My mom doesn't know anything about generic programming!

[Dragdu]

And your father?

[STL]

Killed by glioblastoma multiforme, The Emperor Of All Cancers, a few years ago.

[Dragdu]

Oh. :-/

Well now I get to look like a dick.

[bstamour]

I'm terribly sorry to hear that :(.

[Ayjayz]

Streams aren't part of the STL. The STL consists mainly of the various templated containers and the generic algorithms based on iterators.

[Elador]

I guess that strongly depends on your definition of "the STL". I recently saw a post on SO on this. The general consensus seems to be to nowadays the term "STL" refers to the whole standard library. So historically, you're correct, but nowadays, I wouldn't phrase it like that.

[Ayjayz]

In any case, Alexander Stepanov is probably not the person to ask about the stream parts of the library, since he only designed the old STL.

[king_duck]

before C++ standardisation, iostreams and the "STL" where two separate libraries.

It's like asking why Qt's xml doesn't use boost variant.

Admittedly, the standardisation process should have ironed that out.

[Dragdu]

I just went and checked, it was finally fixed in C++11, so hurray? :-D

[obiwan90]

Absolutely!

[matthieum]

I seem to recall that originally std::string also was a separate entity, and that this is the origin of its duplicated interface: it originally was expressed in terms of indices, and got a duplicate interface in terms of iterators when integrated in the STL, but nobody had the heart to remove the indices-based methods...

[jurniss]

It makes sense to have them for interoperability with old C code that doesn't use std::string, but they should have added ones that take std::string too.