Templates get a whole section of their own for two reasons:

• I like templates and have spent a lot of time working with them, both as a committee member and as a programmer
• They have been extended in so many ways since the Annotated Reference Manual was published

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As described in the ARM, templates allow you to write generic classes and functions parameterised by types:

	template<class T>
class List
{
// ...
};
List<string> names;
template<class T>
void print_list(const List<T>& list);

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The following is a fairly complete list of the changes made by the committee to templates as they were described in the ARM:

• Non-type template arguments
• Default template arguments
• Explicit qualification of template functions
• Templates as template arguments
• Member templates
• Use of template to disambiguate template names
• typename
• Explicit instantiation
• Specialisation and partial specialisation
• Template function overloading
• Separate compilation and exporting template definitions