To STL or not to STL

[lilburne]

What's so wonderful about that? Usually, programmers go to great
lengths to avoid copying containers. C++ makes it all too easy to
write elegant code which is grossly inefficient, due to implicit
copying of large objects.

Some guidelines make copy constructors and assignment
operators private, to avoid such problems. Instead the
recommendation is to have explicit methods on the class that
have to be called.

 

[Christopher Benson-Manica]

My philosophy is that the standard library is usually already debugged. Certainly
any bugs in it are much easier to deal with than reimplementing it and debugging
and providing ongoing support for an equivelent amout of code.

Not so much in the STL (since he never uses it...), but in other code
libraries, he's had to "roll his own" since it was completely impossible to
get what he wanted otherwise. For example (if you'll excuse my venture into
OT territory...), Microsoft and Borland have facilities for dealing with dates
and times, but apparently they just don't work right for our purposes.

That is true. C++ wasn't really usable more than about 10 years ago. I've been
programming in C since 1977. Times change. He needs to shed his antiquated
belief systems. Many people who transition to C++ suffer from this brain damage.

Quite possibly, although that's not really one can say to one's boss At
this point, he's really already done all the work anyway, so from his
perspective his code is superior, since he doesn't have to learn how to use
it (as he might with the STL).

Absolutely, you'd have extreme difficulty with an interview here.

I may have to invest some time in self-teaching myself, since I don't imagine
I'll be working here for the next 40 years. The problem I always have is
finding some meaningful task to accomplish - I've never been able to just read
a book and get anything useful out of it, or even do silly little tutorial
programs and get anything out of them. What to do...