Associative containers are ordered containers. These containers provide member functions that allow the efficient insertion, retrieval and manipulation of keys. The standard library provides the map, multimap, set and multiset associative containers. map and multimap associate values with the keys and allow for fast retrieval of the value, based upon fast retrieval of the key. set and multiset store only keys, allowing fast retrieval of the key itself.
For more information about associative containers, see the Containers section of this reference guide, or see the section on the specific container.