On Tuesday, 15 January 2013 at 07:38:01 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2013-01-14 22:40, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Stream operators are teh eviil. Overloading << and >> for I/O
was a
horrible design decision. Operator overloading should be
reserved for
numeric types. But then again, Stroustrup didn't have the
benefit of
hindsight back then, and certainly, on the surface,
overloading <<
and >> seemed like a cool thing to do. And C++ didn't (still
doesn't?)
have typesafe handling of variadics, so the desire to not have
to write
"cout.put(x); cout.put(y); cout.put(z); cout.put(w); ..." is
understandable.
C++11 has variadic templates.
Let's not forget variadic templates are bleeding edge here.
C++ streams are 20 years old. They are inconvenient, ugly, and
hard to use, *but* they are strongly typed *and* safe, both for
read and wright. And they work. Just because there is something
better today doesn't mean they were a mistake.
*Sure*, today, they can use "writeln(T...)", but not 20 years
ago. On the subject of safety, I still prefer "writeln" over
"writefln". While writefln is safe, you can still botch the
amount of args, and or flag types, in which case writefln will
throw. Writeln never throws (due to a code error).
