Chapter 17. Specialized Library Facilities

Contents

• Section 17.1 The tuple Type
• Section 17.2 The bitset Type
• Section 17.3 Regular Expressions
• Section 17.4 Random Numbers
• Section 17.5 The IO Library Revisited
• Chapter Summary
• Defined Terms

The latest standard greatly increased the size and scope of the library. Indeed, the portion of the standard devoted to the library more than doubled between the first release in 1998 and the 2011 standard. As a result, covering every C++ library class is well beyond the scope of this Primer. However, there are four library facilities that, although more specialized than other library facilities we’ve covered, are general enough to warrant discussion in an introductory book: tuples, bitsets, random-number generation, and regular expressions. In addition, we will also cover some additional, special-purpose parts of the IO library.

The library constitutes nearly two-thirds of the text of the new standard. Although we cannot cover every library facility in depth, there remain a few library facilities that are likely to be of use in many applications: tuples, bitsets, regular expressions, and random numbers. We’ll also look at some additional IO library capabilities: format control, unformatted IO, and random access.