A.2. A Brief Tour of the Algorithms

The library defines more than 100 algorithms. Learning to use these algorithms effectively requires understanding their structure rather than memorizing the details of each algorithm. Accordingly, in Chapter 10 we concentrated on describing and understanding that architecture. In this section we’ll briefly describe every algorithm. In the following descriptions,

• beg and end are iterators that denote a range of elements (§ 9.2.1, p. 331). Almost all of the algorithms operate on a sequence denoted by beg and end.

• beg2 is an iterator denoting the beginning of a second input sequence. If present, end2 denotes the end of the second sequence. When there is no end2, the sequence denoted by beg2 is assumed to be as large as the input sequence denoted by beg and end. The types of beg and beg2 need not match. However, it must be possible to apply the specified operation or given callable object to elements in the two sequences.

• dest is an iterator denoting a destination. The destination sequence must be able to hold as many elements as necessary given the input sequence.

• unaryPred and binaryPred are unary and binary predicates (§ 10.3.1, p. 386) that return a type that can be used as a condition and take one and two arguments, respectively, that are elements in the input range.

• comp is a binary predicate that meets the ordering requirements for key in an associative container (§ 11.2.2, p. 425).

• unaryOp and binaryOp are callable objects (§ 10.3.2, p. 388) that can be called with one and two arguments from the input range, respectively.