Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: The >> operator
Message-ID: <1989Feb24.200919.15728@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <6622@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 89 20:09:19 GMT

In article <6622@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> levy@fine.UUCP (Silvio Levy) writes:
>... 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... Is this the best possible design for >> ?

Possibly not.  It's not clear that it matters that much, though.  If one
is being seriously paranoid about input format, i.e. one is expecting
input typed by humans, one almost invariably ends up reading in a whole
line and then picking it apart in memory.  Formatted-input primitives
just are not terribly useful when erroneous input is a serious issue;
they *never* seem to provide enough hooks for good error handling.
-- 
The Earth is our mother;       |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
our nine months are up.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu