Rethinking how to teach C++, part 3: The first data structures
In effect, we chose to present these low-level data structures because they worked so well with what we had already presented, namely types that all acted like values. In particular, s t r i n g and all the numeric types are valuelike types, and if T is a valuelike type, then so is ve ct or. Therefore, although st ru ct types appear to be primitive, they combine nicely with the st ri ng and vector classes and allow programmers to build up data structures of unbounded richness.