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Whoever thought that the idiomatic approach to "Hello, World!" in their language ought to involve using special overloaded operators as symbols to act on pipes

Whoever thought that the idiomatic approach to "Hello, World!" in their language ought to involve using special overloaded operators as symbols to act on pipes must've been on something very strange.

steveklabnik 3y ago
I don't disagree that iostreams feels like a mistake in retrospect, though you have to put yourself in the time period to understand why people make decisions the way that they do. Bjarne wrote the first version of that library in 1984! And it was moved into the standard in '98. https://stackoverflow.com/a/4854358/24817 https://stackoverflow.com/a/4854358/24817 is the canonical explanation for why >> and <<, apparently. Nearby, this is also mentioned: > C’s printf family of functions is an effective and often convenient I/O mechanism. It is not, however, type safe or extensible to user− defined types (classes). Consequently, I started looking for a type safe, terse, extensible, and efficient alternative to the printf family. Part of the inspiration came from the last page and a half of the Ada Rationale [Ichbiah,1979], which is an argument that you cannot have a terse and type− safe I/O library without special language features to support it. I took that as a challenge. The result was the stream I/O library that was first implemented in 1984 and presented in [Stroustrup,1985]. and > The stream I/O facility is implemented exclusively using language features available to every C++ programmer. Like C, C++ does not have any I/O facilities built into the language. The language simply didn't have the advanced tools that ended up being used in more modern solutions yet. It was too early.
vitaut 3y ago
It is weird but not unique to C++. For example, python used the % operator for string formatting. It's a simple but hacky way to feed arbitrary number of arguments in a type-safe way if you don't have variadics.

Whoever thought that the idiomatic approach to "Hello, World!" in their language ought to involve using special overloaded operators as symbols to act on pipes must've been on something very strange.

steveklabnik 3y ago

I don't disagree that iostreams feels like a mistake in retrospect, though you have to put yourself in the time period to understand why people make decisions the way that they do. Bjarne wrote the first version of that library in 1984! And it was moved into the standard in '98. https://stackoverflow.com/a/4854358/24817 https://stackoverflow.com/a/4854358/24817 is the canonical explanation for why >> and <<, apparently. Nearby, this is also mentioned: > C’s printf family of functions is an effective and often convenient I/O mechanism. It is not, however, type safe or extensible to user− defined types (classes). Consequently, I started looking for a type safe, terse, extensible, and efficient alternative to the printf family. Part of the inspiration came from the last page and a half of the Ada Rationale [Ichbiah,1979], which is an argument that you cannot have a terse and type− safe I/O library without special language features to support it. I took that as a challenge. The result was the stream I/O library that was first implemented in 1984 and presented in [Stroustrup,1985]. and > The stream I/O facility is implemented exclusively using language features available to every C++ programmer. Like C, C++ does not have any I/O facilities built into the language. The language simply didn't have the advanced tools that ended up being used in more modern solutions yet. It was too early.

vitaut 3y ago

It is weird but not unique to C++. For example, python used the % operator for string formatting. It's a simple but hacky way to feed arbitrary number of arguments in a type-safe way if you don't have variadics.