overloading operators for I/O

[Walter Bright]

Michiel wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> Well, you're right of course. But strictly speaking it's still an
> advantage. ;)

C++ iostreams has the further "advantage" of being neither 
exception-safe nor thread-safe (since it manipulates global state in 
order to do formatting). This is only excusable because iostreams was 
added to C++ years before exception handling was and before anyone knew 
anything about threaded programming.