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Language: C++
Expertise: Intermediate

May 19, 1998

The STL vector<>, as well as other standard containers, support comparison and sorting of their members by calling the corresponding standard functions found in the <algorithm> header file. These functions rely on the relational operators such as == and < in order to accomplish that. In case of primitive types such as int, char and pointers, the built-in operators are already defined and will be used. User-defined types, however, require overloading of these operators in order to perform a meaningful comparison and sort:

 

//file: Date.h
class Date { 
public: 
	bool operator == (const Date& d)  const 
	  { return d.Year()==year && d.Month()==month && d.Day()==day;}

	bool operator < (const Date& Date) const;
	};

//file: myprog.cpp

#include 
#include
#include

using namespace std;

void main()
{
	Date d1, d2(1970);
	vector  vd(10);
	vd.push_back(d1);  
vd.push_back(d2);

//sort uses overloaded == and > of class Date	
sort(vd.begin(), vd.end());
}