What are some uses of template template parameters?

Question

I\'ve seen some examples of C++ using template template parameters (that is templates which take templates as parameters) to do policy-based class design. What other uses do

Answer 1

Actually, usecase for template template parameters is rather obvious. Once you learn that C++ stdlib has gaping hole of not defining stream output operators for standard container types, you would proceed to write something like:

template
static inline std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream& out, std::list const& v)
{
    out << '[';
    if (!v.empty()) {
        for (typename std::list::const_iterator i = v.begin(); ;) {
            out << *i;
            if (++i == v.end())
                break;
            out << ", ";
        }
    }
    out << ']';
    return out;
}

Then you'd figure out that code for vector is just the same, for forward_list is the same, actually, even for multitude of map types it's still just the same. Those template classes don't have anything in common except for meta-interface/protocol, and using template template parameter allows to capture the commonality in all of them. Before proceeding to write a template though, it's worth to check a reference to recall that sequence containers accept 2 template arguments - for value type and allocator. While allocator is defaulted, we still should account for its existence in our template operator<<:

template