Third, C++ culture encourages poor use of operators. The standard library itself uses bit-shift operators (<<) and (>>) for string formatting operations! You

Third, C++ culture encourages poor use of operators. The standard library itself uses bit-shift operators (<<) and (>>) for string formatting operations! You can see elsewhere I slagged on C++ for its limited choice of operators, but this criticism never made sense to me. Using << and >> for stream operations isn't confusing to me. They aren't intrinsically shift operators; that's just the only way they were used in C. Perhaps this kind of disagreement is why operator overloading is so despised. I see no reason not to use the same operator to mean two different things in two completely different contexts. I don't especially love the iostreams library, but the choice of << and >> to denote insertion and extraction seems perfectly sane to me, and obviously seems insane to you. For some reason method naming isn't so contentious. The most galling problem is a lack of syntax for declaring collections. There would be no need for `ostream<<` if you could have something like `cout.Write("foo = %d, bar = %d\n", vector[foo, bar])`. This example doesn't make any sense. First, the iostream designers didn't use format strings because they thought IO type-checking should be handled via the same mechanism as type-checking for other operations. This decision might have been infeasible without operator overloading, but the motivation was type safety. Second, you don't need a collection here. It isn't even helpful. If you wanted to use format strings, you could use the same function signature as printf.