A.18 Containers

This clause presents the specifications of the package Containers and several child packages, which provide facilities for storing collections of elements.

A variety of sequence and associative containers are provided. Each container includes a cursor type. A cursor is a reference to an element within a container. Many operations on cursors are common to all of the containers. A cursor referencing an element in a container is considered to be overlapping with the container object itself.

Within this clause we provide Implementation Advice for the desired average or worst case time complexity of certain operations on a container. This advice is expressed using the Landau symbol O(X). Presuming f is some function of a length parameter N and t(N) is the time the operation takes (on average or worst case, as specified) for the length N, a complexity of O(f(N)) means that there exists a finite A such that for any N, t(N)/f(N) < A.

If the advice suggests that the complexity should be less than O(f(N)), then for any arbitrarily small positive real D, there should exist a positive integer M such that for all N > M, t(N)/f(N) < D.

When a formal function is used to provide an ordering for a container, it is generally required to define a strict weak ordering. A function "<" defines a strict weak ordering if it is irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, and in addition, if x < y for any values x and y, then for all other values z, (x < z) or (z < y).

Certain subprograms declared within instances of some of the generic packages presented in this clause are said to perform indefinite insertion. These subprograms are those corresponding (in the sense of the copying described in subclause 12.3) to subprograms that have formal parameters of a generic formal indefinite type and that are identified as performing indefinite insertion in the subclause defining the generic package.

If a subprogram performs indefinite insertion, then certain run-time checks are performed as part of a call to the subprogram; if any of these checks fail, then the resulting exception is propagated to the caller and the container is not modified by the call. These checks are performed for each parameter corresponding (in the sense of the copying described in 12.3) to a parameter in the corresponding generic whose type is a generic formal indefinite type. The checks performed for a given parameter are those checks explicitly specified in subclause 4.8 that would be performed as part of the evaluation of an initialized allocator whose access type is declared immediately within the instance, where: