C++ Primer Plus

A New Trick for cout

Up until now, the examples in this chapter have given cout strings to print. Listing 2.2 also gives cout a variable whose value is an integer:

cout << carrots;

The program doesn’t print the word carrots; instead, it prints the integer value stored in carrots, which is 25. Actually, this is two tricks in one. First, cout replaces carrots with its current numeric value of 25. Second, it translates the value to the proper output characters.

As you can see, cout works with both strings and integers. This might not seem particularly remarkable to you, but keep in mind that the integer 25 is something quite different from the string "25". The string holds the characters with which you write the number (that is, a 2 character and ...