Understanding Template Terminology

Types of templates

So far in this section, we have used the general term templates. However, there are four different terms describing the kind of templates we have written:

• Function template is the term used for a templated function. An example is the max template seen previously.

• Class template is the term used for a templated class (which can be defined either with the class, struct, or union keyword). An example is the vector class we wrote in the previous lesson.

• Variable template is the term used for templated variables, such as the NewLine template from the previous section.

• Alias template is the term used for templated type aliases. We’ll see examples of alias templates in the next section.