Generic programming

Generic programming is a style of programming that helps you develop reusable code or generic algorithms that can be applied to a wide variety of data types. Whenever a generic algorithm is invoked, the data types will be supplied as parameters with a special syntax.  

Let's say we would like to write a sort() function, which takes an array of inputs that needs to be sorted in an ascending order. Secondly, we need the sort() function to sort int, double, char, and string data types. There are a couple of ways this can be solved:

• We could write four different sort() functions for each data type
• We could also write a single macro function 

Well, both approaches have their own merits and demerits. The advantage of the first approach is that, since there are dedicated functions for the int, double, char, and string data types, the compiler...