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The power of STL is partially due to its embracing elements of functional programming. Algorithms implemented in STL, such as for_each, accumulate, find, etc., have functional customization points. You can customize them by providing your own function objects--be it a pointer to a function, a functor object, or a predicate object. Unfortunately, STL provides very limited (and syntactically awkward) support for creating and combining function objects.
C++ programmers have been eying lambda calculus with envy for some time now. Several libraries have been proposed that implement elements of lambda calculus using template metaprogramming in C++, one of them being Boost.Lambda. With these facilities you can easily create and manipulate function objects on the fly. What's more important, you can then pass such objects to STL algorithms to tap their full power.
The slides for this talk were created by David Abrahams and Eric Niebler.
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Bartosz is a theoretical physicist turned programmer. He is the author of the book, C++ In Action, published by Addison-Wesley in 2001. He founded Reliable Software LLC (www.relisoft.com) in 1996 to get first-hand experience in creating and maintaining a large software project--a version-control system called Code Co-op. Studying complexity is his main interest.
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