Table of Contents
A few extensions and nods to backwards-compatibility have been made with containers. Those dealing with older SGI-style allocators are dealt with elsewhere. The remaining ones all deal with bits:
The old pre-standard bit_vector class is
    present for backwards compatibility.  It is simply a typedef for
    the vector<bool> specialization.
    
The bitset class has a number of extensions, described in the
   rest of this item.  First, we'll mention that this implementation of
   bitset<N> is specialized for cases where N number of
   bits will fit into a single word of storage.  If your choice of N is
   within that range (<=32 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, for example), then all
   of the operations will be faster.
There are
   versions of single-bit test, set, reset, and flip member functions which
   do no range-checking.  If we call them member functions of an instantiation
   of bitset<N>, then their names and signatures are:
bitset<N>& _Unchecked_set (size_t pos); bitset<N>& _Unchecked_set (size_t pos, int val); bitset<N>& _Unchecked_reset (size_t pos); bitset<N>& _Unchecked_flip (size_t pos); bool _Unchecked_test (size_t pos);
Note that these may in fact be removed in the future, although we have no present plans to do so (and there doesn't seem to be any immediate reason to).
The member function operator[] on a const bitset returns
   a bool, and for a non-const bitset returns a reference (a
   nested type).  No range-checking is done on the index argument, in keeping
   with other containers' operator[] requirements.
Finally, two additional searching functions have been added.  They return
   the index of the first "on" bit, and the index of the first
   "on" bit that is after prev, respectively:
size_t _Find_first() const; size_t _Find_next (size_t prev) const;
The same caveat given for the _Unchecked_* functions applies here also.