Someone brought this article to my attention that claims (I’m paraphrasing) the STL term is misused to refer to the entire C++ Standard Library instead of the parts that were taken from SGI STL.
(…) it refers to the “STL”, despite the fact that very few people still use the STL (which was designed at SGI).
Parts of the C++ Standard Library were based on parts of the STL, and it is these parts that many people (including several authors and the notoriously error-ridden cplusplus.com) still refer to as “the STL”. However, this is inaccurate; indeed, the C++ standard never mentions “STL”, and there are content differences between the two.
(…) “STL” is rarely used to refer to the bits of the stdlib that happen to be based on the SGI STL. People think it’s the entire standard library. It gets put on CVs. And it is misleading.
I hardly know anything about C++’s history so I can’t judge the article’s correctness. Should I refrain from using the term STL? Or is this an isolated opinion?
