RECURSIVE AND DYNAMIC STRUCTURES IN GENERIC PROGRAMMING

Abstract. Generic programming – an emerging new programming para-digm – best known from Standard Template Library as an essential part of C++ provides an opportunity to extend libraries in an efficient way. Both containers (abstract data structures) and algorithms working on them could be independently designed and implemented at O(1) cost. Unfortu-nately, smoothless cooperation of generic programming and object orien-tation is still an open problem. In this paper we will focus on reducing development and maintenance costs of systems using generative program-ming with recursive data structures to avoid multiple implementations of the components. For cases when separate implementation of algorithms can’t be avoided we provide a system protecting us against changing exist-ing code during extension. Providing such a design is not a trivial problem using currently available tools. We will show a possible solution using a graphic library to demonstrate the problem and our solution with