Can someone explain meaning of this paragraph
The great advantage of pairs is that they have built-in operations to compare themselves. Pairs are compared first-to-second element. If the first elements are not equal, the result will be based on the comparison of the first elements only; the second elements will be compared only if the first ones are equal. The array (or vector) of pairs can easily be sorted by STL internal functions.
and hence this
For example, if you want to sort the array of integer points so that they form a polygon, it’s a good idea to put them to the
vector< pair<double, pair<int,int> >, where each element of vector is{ polar angle, { x, y } }. One call to the STL sorting function will give you the desired order of points.
I have been struggling for an hour to understand this.
Source
The first paragraph says that pairs have an ordering as follows: if you have (x, y) and (z, w), and you compare them, then it will first check if x is smaller (or larger) than z: if yes, than the first pair is smaller (or larger) than the second. If x = z, however, then it will compare y and w. This makes it very convenient to do stuff like sorting a vector of pairs if the first elements of the pairs are more important to the order than the second elements.
The second paragraph gives an interesting application. Suppose you stand at some point on a plane, and there's a polygon enclosing you. Then each point will have an angle and a distance. But given the points, how do you know in what order should they be to form a polygon (without crisscrossing themselves)? If you store the points in this format (angle, distance), then you'll get the circling direction for free. That's actually rather neat.