14.9. Wrap-Up

This chapter introduced one of C++'s most powerful features—templates. You learned how to use function templates to enable the compiler to produce a set of function-template specializations that represent a group of related overloaded functions. We also discussed how to overload a function template to create a specialized version of a function that handles a particular data type's processing in a manner that differs from the other function-template specializations. Next, you learned about class templates and class-template specializations. You saw examples of how to use a class template to create a group of related types that each perform identical processing on different data types. Finally, you learned about some of the relationships among templates, friends, inheritance and static members.

In the next chapter, we discuss many of C++'s I/O capabilities and demonstrate several stream manipulators that perform various formatting tasks.