Understanding the Need for Templates
Understand the need for templates in C++ by exploring how they eliminate repetitive coding when handling various data types. Learn the challenges of function overloading and alternatives like callbacks, then see how templates serve as blueprints for generic programming, enabling versatile and efficient code design.
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Each language feature is designed to help with a problem or task that developers face when using that language. The purpose of templates is to help us avoid writing repetitive code that only differs slightly.
Writing a function
To exemplify this, let’s take the classical example of a max function. Such a function takes two numerical arguments and returns the largest of the two. We can easily implement this as follows:
This works pretty well, but as we can see, it will only work for values of the type int (or those that are convertible to int). What if we need the same function but with arguments of the type double? Then, we can overload this function (create a function with the same name but a different number or type of arguments) for the ...