Advanced C++ Programming Cookbook

Example 4

Example 4 demonstrates the principle of least surprise as follows:

#include <stdio.h>#include <iostream>int main(void){    printf("The answer is: %d\n", 42);    std::cout << "The answer is: " << 42 << '\n';    return 0;}

As shown in the preceding example, another great example of the principle of least surprise is the difference between printf() and std::cout. The printf() function requires the addition of format specifiers to output integers to stdout. There are many reasons why printf() is not intuitive:

• To a beginner, the printf() function's name, which stands for print formatted, is not intuitive (or in other words, the function's name is not self-documenting). Other languages avoid this issue by picking more intuitive names for a print ...