Why does the C++ STL not provide any "tree" containers?

Question

Why does the C++ STL not provide any "tree" containers, and what's the best thing to use instead? I want to store a hierarchy of objects as a tree, rather than use a tree as a performance enhancement...

Answer 1

A standard approach is to define a "node" struct that contains your data field, and left and right pointers to other nodes. One can build a tree out of nodes. You should encapsulate your tree data in a class and provide insert, delete, traverse, etc. functions. If you ensure left children are "less than" the current node and right children are greater then you have a Binary Search Tree.