Subject: stl

From: Peter Henderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 10:14:04 -0500

Tim,

I have about 35 students using different platforms.  With respect to
stl each seems to be different and has it own little strange quirks.
If people will be using your book based on our experiences it would be
very beneficial to provide an STL fact sheet for each of the basic
platforms.

Here is an overview:

g++ we have using 1994 HP STL.  Basically pretty stable but does not
conform to all specifics in your book (eg, resize( ) missing for
vectors).

Borland:  Need to add following line after #include lines

using namespace std;  // needed for Borland

Different versions seem to work differently.  Once student got it
working with 4.0, but had to add operators "=" and "==" (I believe) to
classes for it to work.

We got STL working pretty well with 5.02 after some playing arround.

Microsoft VC++ 5.0:

Again need :

using namespace std;

This is a real strange bird.  We have versions of 5.0 which behave
differently.  In one, only system and user defined types can be used
(eg, vector<int> works but vector<Coin> won't).  It will not accept
classes at all.  We contacted microsoft and they said there is a
recent bug fix for this.  But several other students got it working
with MS VC++ 5.0.  Go figure.

Anyway, hope this is helpful.

Pete