Boost C++ Libraries

For the major operations addition, subtraction, intersection of icl containers and for symmetric difference inplace operators += |=, -=, &= and ^= are provided.

For every inplace operator

T& operator o= (T& object, const P& operand)

the icl provides corresponding infix operators.

T operator o (T object, const P& operand){ return object o= operand; }
T operator o (const P& operand, T object){ return object o= operand; }

From this implementation of the infix operator o the compiler will hopefully use return value optimization (RVO) creating no temporary object and performing one copy of the first argument object.

	Caution
	Compared to the inplace operator o= every use of an infix operator o requires one extra copy of the first argument object that passes a container.

Use infix operators only, if

Time Complexity of infix operators o

The time complexity of all infix operators of the icl is biased by the extra copy of the object argument. So all infix operators o are at least linear in n = object.iterative_size(). Taking this into account, the complexities of all infix operators can be determined from the corresponding inplace operators o= they depend on.