Using Pointers in Practice

A common requirement is to have a collection that can be an arbitrary size and can grow and shrink at runtime. The C++ Standard Library provides various classes to allow you to do this, as will be described in Chapter 5, Using the Standard Library Containers. The following example illustrates some of the principles of how these standard collections are implemented. In general, you should use the C++ Standard Library classes rather than implementing your own. Further, the Standard Library classes encapsulate code together in a class and since we have not covered classes yet, the following code will use functions that potentially can be called incorrectly. So, you should regard this example as just that, example code. A linked list is a common data structure. These are typically used for queues where the order of items is important. For example, a first-in-first-out queue where tasks are performed in the order that they are inserted in the queue. In this example...