17.3. Sequence Adapters

The vector, list, and deque sequences cannot be built from each other without loss of efficiency. On the other hand, stacks and queues can be elegantly and efficiently implemented using those three basic sequences. Therefore, stack and queue are defined not as separate containers, but as adaptors of basic containers.

A container adapter provides a restricted interface to a container. In particular, adapters do not provide iterators; they are intended to be used only through their specialized interfaces.