Re: We have a new standard!

Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org writes:

On Thu, 2 Jan 2025 17:54:18 +0100
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:

On 02/01/2025 15:07, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

Overloading << and >> was unnecessary and confusing.

>
Disagreed.  I really don't think it was problematic.  Nor did any of the
/many/ people who were involved in the design of C++.  Remember, the
language and library has always been discussed, prototyped, and tested
by lots of people before being released.  Stroustrup was the main
language designer, but he was far from alone.

>
Committees often don't come up with optimal solutions. Using the same operator
for 2 entirely different operations unrelated in either concept or function
when there was no need to was illogical and perverse.

Like "*" for multiplication and pointer dereferencing?  Like "&" for
bitwise "and" and address-of?  Like "-" for negation and subtraction?

The meaning of "cout << 0xFF << 2 << 1234;" is obviously a chain of
outputs - output 0xff, output 2, output 1234.  Regardless of the

>
I would expect all mathematical operations to work in EXACTLY the same way
in an output stream.

I would expect << and >> to have their usual precedence whether
overloaded or not.

                     Eg I expect the output to be 256 here:
>
std::cout << 255 + 1 << std::endl;

Which it is.

Yet here there is no maths involved:
>
std::cout << 255 << 1 << std::endl;
>
Thats perverse.

Apparently your expectation was incorrect.

I understand that the precedence of "<<" and ">>" can be slightly
confusing when they're used for I/O -- but it's fairly rare for
operators with lower precedence than the shift operators to be used in
I/O.  Sure, you can write:

    std::cout << n = 42 << "\n";

and it won't compile, but parentheses are an easy fix and a good idea
anyway.

How often has it really been a problem for you?

[...]

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */