Why is the C++ STL set container's count() method thus named?

Question

What it really checks for is contains() and not the count of the number of occurrences, right? Duplicates are not permitted either so wouldn\'t contains() be a better name t

Answer 1

All associative containers must meet the requirements listed in §23.2.4/8 Table 102 - Associative container requirements. One of these is that they implement a.count(k) which then

returns the number of elements with key equivalent to k

So the reason is to have a consistent interface between all associative containers. For instance, this uniformity will be very important when writing generic function templates that must work with any associative container.