Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!udel!princeton!phoenix!fine!levy
From: levy@fine.Princeton.EDU (Silvio Levy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: The >> operator
Message-ID: <6622@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 23 Feb 89 22:32:14 GMT
Sender: news@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Reply-To: levy@fine.UUCP (Silvio Levy)
Organization: Princeton University, Princeton NJ
Lines: 19

I've been using g++ for a couple of weeks, it's my first exposure
to C++.  I'm not very happy with the fact that when something like

cin >> i;	// i is an int

fails (say because the next character is not a digit) the stream's
_fail flag gets set, so no input from cin is possible until I reset 
that flag.  This seems to be much more drastic that the corresponding
situation in C, where a call to scanf() that returns 0 does not
invalidate the input stream.

Am I missing something?  Is this the best possible design for >> ?
Several of my C programs expect to be fed numbers and keywords, variously
intermixed, and if the input is malformed an error message is given.
It seems that in writing the same programs in C++ I'll have to 
add a call to clear() every time something unexpected is found in the
input.  A big pain, in my opinion.

Silvio Levy