Appendix B. A Short Library Reference
Most of the power of a programming language comes from its libraries, which give a programmer access to hundreds of thousands of lines of well-debugged code. The C/C++ library is particularly rich and often supplies more than one way to handle a situation; knowing the standard library well keeps you from having to reinvent the wheel. Conversely, any language that can't be extended by libraries will not last, as illustrated by the case of Pascal. Standard Pascal died out because it did not offer powerful libraries, but Pascal has been revived in recent years, thanks to Borland making the Delphi VCL library comprehensive and extensible. Generally, you can find excellent C++ libraries freely available to do specialized tasks; examples are the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and SAX and DOM libraries for dealing with eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
NOTE
The standard library does not currently have any classes for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). One of the reasons for Java's popularity is precisely because it has a standard GUI framework.
Whole books have been written about the C++ libraries (Stroustrup's book The C++ Programming Language, 3rd edition, Addison-Wesley 1997, devotes more than 300 pages to it), so this appendix does not try to cover everything. Rather, like a good librarian, it indicates what's important and helps you navigate the online documentation. This chapter also does not give overloaded versions of all the methods and functions; rather, it discusses only the main methods and functions that show the range of functionality offered by the libraries.
The UnderC standard “pocket” library is still under development, and there are some classes and standard algorithms that are not finished yet. So currently there are no valarray or complex classes; updates will be available. But all of these classes are available from either GCC or BCC32.