Tools.h++ Manual

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• Time and date handling classes
Calculate the number of days between two dates, or the day of the week a
date represents; read and write days or times in arbitrary formats; etc.
• Internationalization support
Class RWLocale provides a convenient and easy-to-use framework for
internationalizing your software. Class RWTimeZone makes manipulating
time zones and daylight savings time easy.
• Persistent store
A powerful and sophisticated persistent store facility that allows complex
objects inheriting from class RWCollectable to be stored to disk or even
exchanged through a heterogeneous network or Windows 3.X’s Dynamic
Data Exchange. The object’s morphology (e.g., multiple pointers to the
same object, or a circularly linked list) is maintained.
• Template based classes
A complete set of collection classes based on C++ templates. These include
singly- and doubly-linked lists, stacks, queues, ordered collections, hash
tables, sets, dictionaries, etc.
• Generic collection classes
For compilers that do not support templates yet, Tools.h++ includes a set of
template-like classes that use the C++ preprocessor and <generic.h> , a
header file included with most compilers. The interface to these “generic”
classes is similar enough to the template-based classes that if you decide to
make the transition, it will be easy.
• Smalltalk-like collection classes
A complete library of collection classes, modeled after the Smalltalk-80
programming environment: Set, Bag, OrderedCollection,
SortedCollection, Dictionary, Stack, Queue , etc. All of these
classes can be saved to disk and restored in a new address space, even on a
different operating system! An object need only inherit the abstract base
class RWCollectable to have full access to all of the functionality of the
collection classes. The interface to the Smalltalk names is done as
typedefs, allowing the actual implementation of, say, a Dictionary to be
changed from its default of a hash table of associations, to, say, a B-Tree.
• RWFile Class
Encapsulates standard file operations.
• B-Tree disk retrieval
Efficient keyed access of disk records, using B-Trees.