AMDG Ovanes Markarian wrote:
Just an addition:
Explicit specialization of std templates is legal. So if you _exactly_ know vector types for which your <<-operator should work you can write:
namespace std { template<> ostream& operator<< (ostream& os, const vector<MyTypeX>& v) { copy(v.begin(), v.end(), ostream_iterator<T>(os, ";")); return os; } }
By the way there was a big discussion about this on std list and I fluently read the upcoming Standard draft and saw that this paragraph changed. I not any longer sure if this will be allowed with the new standard.
There has to be template to specialize. The std library doesn't have an overload of operator<< that matches std vector. Specialization can't change that. In Christ, Steven Watanabe