Quote Originally Posted by itsmeandnobodyelse
Really? You can't safely derive from it, can you? You can't add new member functions therefore, right?

Enhancements via function templates hardly can be used for praising a class design. On the contrary, they are global functions and I share the opinion that global functions mostly is poor OOP and the need for those functions show the heavy shortcomings of this class.
Heh, when you stated that "the basic_string class actually is a poor string class", I actually thought that you had its over-abundance of member functions in mind. Apparently not. Read: