Writing and Using Generic Algorithms

The Algorithm library contains generic algorithms. To keep things as concrete as possible here, we will show an example of how a generic algorithm can be implemented. This will provide us with some insights into how to use the standard algorithms and, at the same time, demonstrate that implementing a generic algorithm is not that hard. We will intentionally avoid explaining all the details about the example code here because we will spend a lot of time on generic programming later in this course.

We will transform a simple non-generic algorithm into a full-fledged generic one in the following examples.

Non-generic algorithms

A generic algorithm is an algorithm that can be used with various ranges of elements, not only one specific type, such as std::vector. The following algorithm is an example of a non-generic algorithm that only works with std::vector<int>: