Editing Standard library (section)

==Philosophies==
Philosophies of standard library design vary widely. For example, [[Bjarne Stroustrup]], designer of [[C++]], writes:
{{quote|What ought to be in the standard C++ library? One ideal is for a programmer to be able to find every interesting, significant, and reasonably general class, function, template, etc., in a library. However, the question here is not, "What ought to be in ''some'' library?" but "What ought to be in the ''standard'' library?" The answer "Everything!" is a reasonable first approximation to an answer to the former question but not the latter. A standard library is something every implementer must supply so that every programmer can rely on it.<ref>Bjarne Stroustrup. ''The C++ Programming Language''. 3rd Ed. Addison-Wesley, 1997</ref>}}

This suggests a relatively small standard library, containing only the constructs that "every programmer" might reasonably require when building a large collection of software. This is the philosophy that is used in the [[C (programming language)|C]] and [[C++]] standard libraries.

By contrast, [[Guido van Rossum]], designer of [[Python (programming language)|Python]], has embraced a much more inclusive vision of the standard library. Python attempts to offer an easy-to-code, object-oriented, high-level language.{{cn|date=April 2024}} In the Python tutorial, he writes:
{{quote|Python has a "batteries included" philosophy. This is best seen through the sophisticated and robust capabilities of its larger packages.<ref>Guido van Rossum. [https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/stdlib.html#batteries-included].</ref>}}

Van Rossum goes on to list libraries for processing [[XML]], [[XML-RPC]], [[Email|email messages]], and localization, facilities that the C++ standard library omits. This other philosophy is often found in [[scripting language]]s (as in [[Python (programming language)|Python]] or [[Ruby (programming language)|Ruby]]) or languages that use a [[virtual machine]], such as [[Java (programming language)|Java]] or the [[.NET Framework]] languages. In C++, such facilities are not part of the standard library, but instead are included in other libraries, such as [[Boost (C++ libraries)|Boost]].