Then the program goes berserk as soon as the first non-number is read out of standard input. All the other "cin >> integer" lines are immediately skipped.
Yes, I know about error checking, clearing error condition, discarding characters. But it's a whole lot of stuff you need to do after every single "cin>>" line. It makes the simplicity of cin not worth it.
How could you ever continue after the second statement without checking if you actually read an integer or not? How would you know what you can do with a?
You couldn't or wouldn't. but why have a read statement like cin>> which looks so nice and clean when you then have to go and check everything with flags and boolean casts on stateful objects.
I agree. It's lunacy. just be explicit and use functions or equivalent like literally every other language.
Well in a language like Haskell you could solve this with monads and do-notation. The general idiom in Haskell is to use a Maybe or Either monad to capture success/failure and you assume you’re on the happy path. Then you put the error handling at the consumer end of the pipeline when you unwrap the Maybe or Either.
I believe Rust has adopted similar idioms. I’ve heard the overall idea referred to as Railway-oriented programming.
In C++ you could implement it with exceptions, though they bring in a bunch of their own baggage that you don’t have to deal with when using monads.
C and C++ are the bedrock of operating systems with the best performance and extensive support for all languages.
The only reason why iostreams are slow is because of its incompatible buffering scheme, and the fact that C and C++ need to stay in sync when linked together. And that brand of slow is still faster than other languages, except sometimes those that delegate i/o to pure C implementations.
Historical baggage, they weren't the first system programming languages, got lucky with UNIX's license allowing for widespread adoption, and won't be the last one standing either.
Considering that they are evolving, I think they are more likely than not to stay standing. There might be other similar languages developed in parallel, but after over 30 years of whining C and C++ are still popular. I don't expect that to change.
It's like using a sledgehammer for a picture hook. I think QT is a great tool, and it solves this problem nicely, but it's a full blown framework, and if you're already using something else - particularly if it's something "light" like SDL, or just a platform specific library like Win32, it's an awful lot to pull in (plus compile times, licensing, etc).
