overloading operators for I/O

[Bill Baxter]

Michiel wrote:
> Don Clugston wrote:
> 
>> I agree. There's another problem -- it really doesn't scale well. With
>> printf, you can do "%3.5f" to print a floating point number with a given
>> precision. With <<, that same operation is really horrible.
> 
> But it has the added advantage that there is no need for run-time
> parsing of that string. C++ parses all << stuff at compile time.
> 

I wonder how much difference that makes given that most IO tends to be 
slow anyway.   On a 1 GHz proc, with a disk that has 10msec seek time 
that means a hit to the disk can cost you ten million cycles, right?

Spending a few cycles to parse a format string at runtime isn't going to 
kill you.

--bb