Chapter Overview

Much of the power of the STL is in the standardization of container interfaces. If a container has a particular capability, there's a good chance that the interface for that capability is standardized across container types. This standardization makes possible a library of algorithms that operate seamlessly across containers and sequences sharing a common interface.

For example, if we want to sum all the elements in a vector of int, we could use a loop, or we could use an algorithm: