C++ How to Program, 10/e

14.12 Object Serialization

This chapter and Chapter 13 introduced the object-oriented style of input/output. In Chapter 10, we showed how to input and output objects using operator overloading. We accomplished object input by overloading the stream extraction operator, >>, for the appropriate istream. We accomplished object output by overloading the stream insertion operator, <<, for the appropriate ostream. In both cases, only an object’s data members were input or output, and, in each case, they were in a format meaningful only for objects of that particular type. An object’s member functions are not input or output with the object’s data; rather, one copy of the class’s member functions remains available internally and is shared by all objects ...