Re: [boost] Re: Re: Functions as Filters (was Program Reuse...)

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-13 11:49:33

christopher diggins wrote:
>> This is just a reflection of the general "globals are bad" principle.
>
> Most of the application code I have seen written, does so directly to
> cout rather than to a function parameter. I also don't see any
> advantage to passing istream and ostream as function parameters, when
> cin and cout can be easily redirected using rdbuf.

The advantages of following a style of programming where functions do not 
take hidden arguments and do not reference global state are well known.

Even if in this particular case the "wrong way" does not cause much harm 
because of cin and cout's redirection capability, in general, if a module 
has been written to operate on a hardcoded global (or a singleton), you will 
not be able to reuse it.