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18: Mainline

So that you are encouraged to develop a personal library of solutions to standard programming problems, this book introduces many useful, productivity-increasing, general-purpose, templatelike patterns that you can fill in to achieve particular-purpose goals. These templatelike patterns are often called programming idioms.

You learn about programming idioms because learning to program involves more than learning to use rules of program composition, just as learning to speak a human language involves more than learning to use vocabulary words.