It has been increasingly recognized over the past decade that one of the important roles of a standard language or standard library is to provide vocabulary types. A "vocabulary" type is a type that purports to provide a single lingua franca, a common language, for dealing with its domain.
Notice that even before C++ existed, the C programming language had already made a decent shot at the vocabulary of some areas, providing standard types or type aliases for integer math (int), floating-point math (double), timepoints expressed in the Unix epoch (time_t), and byte counts (size_t).
In this chapter we'll learn:
- The history of vocabulary types in C++, from std::string to std::any
- The definitions of algebraic data type, product ...
