Summary

In this chapter, we have furthered our C++ programming knowledge beyond OOP language features to include additional language features that will enable us to write more extensible code. We have learned how to utilize template functions and template classes, and how operator overloading nicely supports these endeavors.

We have seen that templates can allow us to generically specify a class or function with respect to the data type primarily used within that class or function. We have seen that template classes inevitably utilize template functions because those methods generally need to generically use the data upon which the class is built. We have seen that by taking advantage of operator overloading for user defined types, we can take advantage of method bodies written using simple operators to accommodate usage by more complex data types, making the template code much more useful and extensible.

The power of templates coupled with operator overloading (to make a method...