Iostream Library and Basic I/O in C++
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The foundation of every relationship is communication. The quality of the communication is the first factor that determines the way the relationship evolves. This statement also holds true in the world of C++, and to raise the quality of communication, a library called iostream has been implemented.
C++ evolved from C, and when the old style C functions of printf/scanf proved not to be secure enough and offered some major limitations, the decision was made to replace them with something more practical. The solution offered was streams.
What streams represent in their basics and what they should do in theory I have already explained in a separate article published here on the Developer Shed Network. The article is titled Introduction to Streams. Read it before you venture further into today's article to fully comprehend this one.
This is part of the series that continues our insight into every little dark corner of streams. Today we will see how the iostream library is built, what it offers, and endeavor to detail the basic input/output operation to the screen maintained by the cin, cout stream.
The input/output functionality is not defined in the core of the C++ language; rather, it is provided inside a library, and thanks to this, you are going to find it inside the STL library.
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