From: John Beckett 

"Geo"  wrote in message
news::
> cout formatting is easy

Yes, but printf allows me to remember a small number of rules that allow me
to easily do stuff like show a float with 2 fractional digits, or show an
integer in hex using lowercase a-f. Align left/right is easy. And some
more. Some of the cout equivalents are pretty weird.

> you see this as elegant?

It's elegant because you can define your own classes (containing arbitrary
data), with your own methods to perform stream i/o. Example:

// Book is a class defined elsewhere.
Book b("The Selfish Gene", "Richard Dawkins",
"Oxford", 29.95); cout << b << newl;    // output
value of b

> shouldn't that be 4.0/5.0 instead of leaving the zero off

I would definitely write 4.0 (rather than 4.). I was making the point,
however, that 4. is valid and is a double, whereas 4 is an int.

John

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