I don't understand what cin and cout accomplish in C++ that isn't already accomplished in C's similar functionality like fgets, scanf, etc... Of course they're probably also compatible with std::string, but does anyone know why they went with the >> << formatting syntax stuff rather than a typical print function?
The syntax for these two constructs just seems bizarre and out-of-place compared to most other things in the language. I also come from C and don't quite understand the purposes of having them.
Can someone give a brief history lesson on why cin and cout were created? And why there's "endl" rather than \n? Although I would assume in endl's case that the particular endline char changes platform to platform so endl is an abstraction which takes care of that.