Different alternatives It is possible. There are several alternative approaches to your problem. Each one has different advantages and drawbacks (I will explain each one): Create an interface and have a template class which implements this interface for different types. It should support cloning. Use boost::variant and visitation. Blending static and dynamic polymorphism For the … Read more
How do you call .begin() and .end() on a C-array ? Free-functions allow for more generic programming because they can be added afterwards, on a data-structure you cannot alter.
The standard containers define size_type as a typedef to Allocator::size_type (Allocator is a template parameter), which for std::allocator<T>::size_type is typically defined to be size_t (or a compatible type). So for the standard case, they are the same. However, if you use a custom allocator a different underlying type could be used. So container::size_type is preferable … Read more
The component type of containers like vectors must be assignable. References are not assignable (you can only initialize them once when they are declared, and you cannot make them reference something else later). Other non-assignable types are also not allowed as components of containers, e.g. vector<const int> is not allowed.
This cheat sheet provides a pretty good summary of the different containers. See the flowchart at the bottom as a guide on which to use in different usage scenarios: Created by David Moore and licensed CC BY-SA 3.0