Editing Partial template specialization (section)

===Example===
Suppose there exists a <code>KeyValuePair</code> class with two template parameters, as follows.
<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp">
template <typename Key, typename Value>
class KeyValuePair {};
</syntaxhighlight>

The following is an example of a class that defines an explicit full template specialization of <code>KeyValuePair</code> by pairing integers with strings. The class type retains the same name as the original version.
<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp">
template <>
class KeyValuePair<int, std::string> {};
</syntaxhighlight>

The next is an example of partial specialization of <code>KeyValuePair</code> with the same name as the original version and one specialized template parameter.
<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp">
template <typename Key>
class KeyValuePair<Key, std::string> {};
</syntaxhighlight>

The next example class <code>KeyStringPair</code> is [[Inheritance (object-oriented programming)|derived]] from the original  <code>KeyValuePair</code> with a new name, and defines a partial template specialization. In contrast to the explicit specialization above, only the ''Value'' template parameter of the [[Inheritance (object-oriented programming)#Subclasses and superclasses|superclass]] is specialized, while the ''Key'' template parameter remains generic.
<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp">
template <typename Key>
class KeyStringPair : public KeyValuePair<Key, std::string> {};
</syntaxhighlight>

It does not matter which template parameters are specialized and which remain generic. For instance, the following is also a valid example of a partial specialization of the original <code>KeyValuePair</code> class.
<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp">
template <typename Value>
class IntegerValuePair : public KeyValuePair<int, Value> {};
</syntaxhighlight>