Writing Our First Templates
Learn and practice template syntax in C++ through hands-on template creation.
We'll cover the following...
It’s now time to see how templates are written in the C++ language. In this lesson, we’ll start with three simple examples, one for each of the snippets presented earlier.
The max function
A template version of the max function discussed previously would look as follows:
template<typename T>T max(T const a, T const b){return a > b ? a : b;}
The template version of the max function
We’ll notice here that the type name (such as int or double) has been replaced with T (which stands for “type”). T is called a type template parameter and is introduced with the syntax template<typename T> or typename<class T>. Keep in mind that T is a parameter, so it can have any name. We’ll learn more about template parameters in the next ...