HP'S SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY ENTERS PUBLIC DOMAIN; HP's Standard Template Library, Hailed as Important Advance in Software, Accepted by ANSI/ISO C++ Standards Committee

Business Wire, Dec 19, 1994

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 19, 1994-- Hewlett-Packard Company today announced that its Standard Template Library (STL) has been accepted by the ANSI/ISO Standards Committee as a part of the emerging international standard for the C programming language. HP has placed its implementation of STL in the public domain as a service to the programming community.

STL, designed by HP Laboratories researchers Alexander Stepanov and Meng Lee, provides a comprehensive set of programming guidelines and a large collection of generic software components.

Many software experts believe that STL may radically change the way software is developed.

"The Standard Template Library may be the single most important advance in the software art within the last decade," said Steve Johnson, one of the founders of UNIX (R) compiler technology and the president of USENIX.

"Using STL, both as a tool and as a guide for building new tools, is as significant an advance over object-oriented programming as object-oriented programming was over traditional procedural programming," said P.J. Plauger, author of numerous programming books.

"We are in great debt to Alex, his co-workers and HP for what may be the single greatest contribution to the C standards effort," said Bjarne Stroustrup, the designer of C and a researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories. "The inclusion of STL into the standard library remedies a serious problem by providing for the first time a set of container classes and fundamental algorithms to go with them. It provides programmers with a large, systematic, clean, formally sound, comprehensible, elegant and efficient framework."

BUSINESS APPEAL

Many companies are looking to STL for its potential cost-saving benefits.

"STL has more useful features than any of the commercial libraries we use today, but more important, because it's part of the C standard we can use it to write portable code we can take from project to project, compiler to compiler," said Larry Podmolik, a technical manager at Andersen Consulting in Chicago. "Our people don't have to learn a new library for every project and can at last work with a truly standard set of tools."

ALGORITHMS -- GENERIC AND EFFICIENT

STL contains a broad set of algorithms that perform the most common kinds of data manipulations all programmers use, including searching, sorting, merging, copying and transforming.

The algorithms work with diverse data types residing in different data structures, yet they have been designed to be as efficient as hand-crafted code. For example, the "find" algorithm in STL works on lists, vectors, files or any data structure for which the concept of finding makes sense.

ITERATORS -- A DATA-ACCESSING CONCEPT

STL formally defines the standard data-accessing concept -- "iterator." It defines several categories of iterators, each providing a different way of accessing data. A forward iterator guides the algorithm through the data from beginning to end -- like reading words in a book. A bi-directional iterator lets the algorithm move forward and backward -- like the fast forward and rewind functions for searching a VCR tape. A random-access iterator can jump around -- like looking up individual words in a dictionary. All the algorithms are written in terms of these abstract categories. Because of this, one implementation of an algorithm works with any type of data structure, eliminating the need to create a specific implementation for each data structure.

A FORMAL FRAMEWORK

STL establishes mathematical guidelines for the software components. Programmers who follow these guidelines are guaranteed the interoperability of the components they create with other STL-conforming components.

"To transform programming from an art to a science, it is necessary to develop a conceptual taxonomy of software components together with a system of laws governing their behavior," said Stepanov. "STL does that."

STL AVAILABILITY

The implementation of STL may be obtained by anonymous ftp from butler.hpl.hp.com in the directory /stl.

Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 98,400 employees and had revenue of $25 billion in its 1994 fiscal year.

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CONTACT: Copithorne & Bellows for HP

              Robert Jones, 415/284-5200
              Hewlett-Packard
              Cheryl Ritchie, 415/857-7968