Professional C++

Chapter 14. Demystifying C++ I/O

A program's fundamental job is to accept input and produce output. A program that produces no output of any sort would not be very useful. All languages provide some mechanism for I/O, either as a built-in part of the language or through OS-specific hooks. A good I/O system is both flexible and easy to use. Part of being flexible is polymorphism: flexible I/O systems support input and output through a variety of devices, such as files and the user console. They also support the reading and writing of different types of data. I/O is error-prone because data coming from a user can be incorrect or the underlying file system or other data source can be inaccessible. Thus, a good I/O system is also capable of handling error conditions.

If you are familiar with the C language, you have undoubtedly used printf() and scanf(). As I/O mechanisms, printf() and scanf() are certainly flexible. Through escape codes and variable placeholders, they can be customized to read in specially formatted data or output anything from an integer to a string. printf() and scanf(), however, falter on other measures of good I/O systems. They do not handle errors particularly well, they are not flexible enough to handle custom data types, and, worst of all in an object-oriented language like C++, they are not at all object oriented!

C++ provides a more refined method of input and output through a mechanism known as streams. Streams are a flexible and object-oriented approach to ...