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

From: Rob Stewart (stewart_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-13 12:23:40

From: christopher diggins <cdiggins_at_[hidden]>
> From: "Peter Dimov" <pdimov_at_[hidden]>
> >
> > IMO, this is how a more realistic example would look like:
> [snip]
> > 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.

Part of the issue being raised here are whether it is wise to
promote code that uses cin and cout in these ways and relies upon
redirection via rdbuf() to make them reusable.  If a client of
your library must rewrite main() in order to make it usable, is
it onerous to expect that the code would be altered to use
supplied streams rather than cin and cout?  Even a slight
alteration to your library would provide the same feature set but
would encourage clients to write better code in the future.

-- 
Rob Stewart                           stewart_at_[hidden]
Software Engineer                     http://www.sig.com
Susquehanna International Group, LLP  using std::disclaimer;