C++ STL Map vs Vector speed

Question

In the interpreter for my experimental programming language I have a symbol table. Each symbol consists of a name and a value (the value can be e.g.: of type string, int, fu

Answer 1

Normally you'd use a symbol table to look up the variable given its name as it appears in the source. In this case, you only have the name to work with, so there's nowhere to store the cached position of the variable in the symbol table. So I'd say a map is a good choice. The [] operator takes time proportional to the log of the number of elements in the map - if it turns out to be slow, you could use a hash map like std::tr1::unordered_map.