Why does the standard library have find and find_if?

Question

Couldn\'t find_if just be an overload of find? That\'s how std::binary_search and friends do it...

Answer 1

It can't have the same name because there would be an ambiguity. Suppose that we had a find overload instead of find_if. Then suppose:

// Pseudo-code
struct finder
{
    bool operator()(const T&) const { ... }
    bool operator==(const finder& right) const { ... }
}

std::vector finders;

finder my_finder;

std::find(finders.begin(), finders.end(), my_finder);

The find would have no way to resolve the inconsistency: Should it attempt to find the finder in the container, or use the finder to do the find operation? To solve this problem they created two function names.