🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <48h0vg$8i6@meg.tesser.com> ralphs@tesser.com (Ralph Shnelvar) writes:

> I haven't even peeked at the STL but am wondering if there is support
> for a disk based sorting and/or indexing algorithms.
> 
> That is, is there support for sorting monster arrays.

No.  The closest thing the STL has to what you're looking for is its
istream_iterator and ostream_iterator.  I don't think they'd really 
be appropriate for this task, though.

The good news, though, is that the STL isn't a container class library
in any conventional sense; it isn't even a container, iterator, and
algorithm library either, although that comes closer.  What it really
is is a set of requirements that containers, iterators, and algorithms
must satisfy if they are to work together, and a fairly large but
deliberately incomplete set of predefined containers, iterators, and
algorithms.

In other words: if you define iterators that point into data files
(depending on your design, and on your OS's file I/O capabilities, you
might choose to use input iterators, forward iterators, or even random
access iterators), then you can use all of the STL algorithms that
make sense for iterators of that category.

If you look in the draft standard, by the way, you'll see no mention
of the STL in the table of contents.  It's a very important part of
the standard C++ class library, so the original STL manual has been
distributed into various parts of the draft standard.  The most
important places to look are Chapter 20 (General Utilities), Chapter
23 (Containers), Chapter 24 (Iterators), and Chapter 25 (Algorithms).
Other parts of the standard library are influenced by the STL too,
though; strings, for example, are now STL containers.
-- 
  Matt Austern                             He showed his lower teeth.  "We 
  matt@physics.berkeley.edu                all have flaws," he said, "and 
  http://dogbert.lbl.gov/~matt             mine is being wicked."

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