Re: We have a new standard!

On 01/01/2025 17:33, Muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:

On Wed, 1 Jan 2025 18:25:27 +0200
Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> gabbled:

Introduction of format() already showed that C++ committee is aware of
of the fact that "Stroustrup streams" are crap not only relatively to
format/printing facilities of more modern languages, but relatively
to what we have in C as well. std::print() proves that committee is not
only aware of the fact, but finally willing to consider fixes.

 Plus overloading << and >> was a cretinous decision. There was zero reason
he couldn't have created some new operators to avoid confusion, <<< and >>>
or <= , => for example where such combinations in C would never be legal
syntax anyway.
 

I don't actually agree - I think the choice of << and >> was not a bad one, though <= and => could have worked too.  Adding new operators just for the purpose of streams would have been overkill, IMHO.  The big alternative would have been to have a way to add new operators to the language.  That would have been a huge change to C++ - the language, the tools, and the way we write code.  Maybe it would have been good, maybe bad, but certainly it would have been big.
IMHO the real mistake for iostreams for formatted output was making them modal - IO manipulators are a /terrible/ idea.  The type system and overloading should have been used instead, so that we would write :
cout << hex(x);
instead of
cout << hex << x << dec;
There are still plenty of other issues with the iostreams formatted output, but the choice of operator is the least of the problems.