Requirements for Container Elements

Requirements for Container Elements

Containers, iterators, and algorithms of the STL are templates. Thus, they can process any type, whether predefined or user defined. However, because of the operations that are called, some requirements apply. The elements of STL containers must meet the following three fundamental requirements: 

1. An element must be copyable by a copy constructor. The generated copy should be equivalent to the source. This means that any test for equality returns that both are equal and that both source and copy behave the same. All containers create internal copies of their elements and return temporary copies of them, so the copy constructor is called very often. Thus, the copy constructor should perform well (this is not a requirement, but a hint to get better performance). If copying objects takes too much time you can avoid copying objects by using the containers with reference semantics. See Section 6.8, for details.
2. An element must be assignable by the assignment operator. Containers and algorithms use assignment operators to overwrite old elements with new elements.
3. An element must be destroyable by a destructor. Containers destroy their internal copies of elements when these elements are removed from the container. Thus, the destructor must not be private. Also, as usual in C++, a destructor must not throw; otherwise, all bets are off.

These three operations are generated implicitly for any class. Thus, a class meets the requirements automatically, provided no special versions of these operations are defined and no special members disable the sanity of those operations. Elements might also have to meet the following requirements.

Note: In some older C++ systems, you may have to implement these additional requirements even if they are not used. For example, some implementations of vector always require the default constructor for elements. Other implementations always require the existence of the comparison operator. However, according to the standard, such a requirement is wrong, and these limitations will likely be eliminated.

• For some member functions of sequence containers, the default constructor must be available. For example, it is possible to create a nonempty container or increase the number of elements with no hint of the values those new elements should have. These elements are created without any arguments by calling the default constructor of their type.
• For several operations, the test of equality with operator == must be defined. It is especially needed when elements are searched.
• For associative containers the operations of the sorting criterion must be provided by the elements. By default, this is the operator <, which is called by the less<> function object.