Functions and pausing

Hi

I just finished another section on my C++ book which went over functions. I understood it completely and all--or inleast I thought I did. To practice what I just learned I wrote a simple program with two functions, myMessage() and of course main(). main() passes control to myMessage() which in turn displays a message and passes control back to main(). Now, the problem I came across was in pausing the program so I can view the results. No matter where I put the system("pause") or even getch(); functions the program would pause at the beginning.

Code:

---

#include <iostream.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

// define function that will display message
void myMessage()
{
        cout << "Message from myMessage() here";
        return;
}

void main()
{
        cout << "Message from main() here\n\n";
       
        myMessage();
       
        system("pause");
        return;
}

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I know there must be some simple mistake as I've been making a lot of those lately. Can someone please enlighten me of a way around this problem?

Output using cout is buffered. The buffer wont be flushed until after your system("pause") or getch(). You'll either have to manually flush it using cout.flush() or tag an endl or flush onto the end of your output statements -

cout << "Message from myMessage() here" << flush;

or get some buffered input (using cin), which will automatically flush the output buffer.

Just out of curiousity, why are you including return statements when they are not needed (your functions are void).

zen, thank you very much for your reply, flushing the output manually worked very well. and i thought about using cin >> but it didn't seem like good programming etiquette.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Unregistered
Just out of curiousity, why are you including return statements when they are not needed (your functions are void).

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the code that i listed was not my original code. it was a little more complicated than this one as I took out some code. i added the return statements just to avoid any confusion since a lot of people are used to seeing them in every function.

Here's a thought: NEVER use 'void main'. Search the board for reasons why. Or just read the FAQ.

Quzah.