iostream

[Screed]

O.K. There's something that's been bothering me, what exactly is iostream? I know it and using namespace std; let you use the cout and cin functions, but I don't know exactly what it is. Could someone explain it in detail but without getting to complicated?

[webJose]

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/

[Moschops]

iostream is the name given to a set of very useful functions, all to do with input and ouput from streams.

What are you actually asking here? Are you asking what #include does? Are you asking what a library is?

[Albatross]

iostream is three things.

1. It's a header that you can add to the top of your files to allow you to use the cin, cout, cerr, and clog global objects.

2. It's a class in the <istream> header that allows you to both read and write from a stream. I'm pretty sure this class was meant to be derived from and can't be used normally.

3. It's a section of the standard C++ library that is designed to handle streams, whether they be to/from a file, to/from somewhere in memory, to/from the three standard input/output streams, or somewhere else,

-Albatross

[Screed]

iostream is three things.

1. It's a header that you can add to the top of your files to allow you to use the cin, cout, cerr, and clog global objects.

2. It's a class in the <istream> header that allows you to both read and write from a stream. I'm pretty sure this class was meant to be derived from and can't be used normally.

3. It's a section of the standard C++ library that is designed to handle streams, whether they be to/from a file, to/from somewhere in memory, to/from the three standard input/output streams, or somewhere else,

-Albatross

Oh ok, thanks :)