Thread: printf and cout

>but I think that the cout is more readable.

cout is more readable for unformatted debug output. Once you need to do heavy formatting printf gets more comfortable.

Originally posted by master5001
cout is only as type safe as you want it to be.

Example

Code:

int whatever = -1;
std::cout << *(std::string *)whatever << std::endl;

Though it seems like I had to do a lot of work to break cout, in the real world this sort of thing comes up every once in a while.

That's still promoting type-safety -- you have to typecast it in order to get it to do something like that. When using printf it's a matter of using a different format descriptor.

cout is more readable, but printf produces smaller binaries.

Originally posted by Jaguar
cout is more readable, but printf produces smaller binaries.

Opinion and implementation dependant

From Stroustrup himself

Why is the code generated for the "Hello world" program ten times larger for C++ than for C?
It isn't on my machine, and it shouldn't be on yours. In fact, the object code for the C++ version of the "hello world" program is smaller than the C version on my machine. There is no language reason why the one version should be larger than the other. It is all an issue on how the implementor organized the libraries. If one version is significantly larger than the other, report the problem to the implementor of the larger.

Discussed long enough... closed.