Re: Redirecting I/O

I apologize and I did ask the same question yesterday. Your answer on using a
reference will work only in the definition:

   ostream& x = cout; // OK

It will not work in the code because the operator '=' is private.

ostream& x; // needs an assignment (see below)
void fn() { x = cout; } // operator '=' private.

Another issue (perhaps minor) is that a definition of a reference won't
work, it must be an assignment:

   ostream& x; // needs a right-hand side
   ostream& x = cout; // works great;

Assignment of a ostream and an ofstream object is not allowed:

ofstream file;
ofstream x = (condition)?cout: file; // fails because cout is an ostream
object and
                                                   // file is an ofstream
object

I would be nice to find a reasonable workaround to this last problem (other
than a wrapper function).

An example of the code issues are given in the program below. What happened
to your original answer is that it seemed to work but after I looked further,
i discovered some things that I hadn't seen at first blush. And then I found
terminology which was more appropriate for what I was going to do (redirect
I/O), and then I went crazy and reposted. I sincerely apologize but I am
stumped. At the end of the day I will probably have to abandon my idea of
using the same stream name to be either of an ostream or an ofstream object.
Sigh. Knitting must be better.

thanks
art

PROGRAM

# include <iostream>
# include <fstream>

using namespace std;

bool condition;
ofstream file;
ofstream& out = (condition)?cout: file; // fails: cout:ostream, file:ofstream

int main() {
  return 0;
}

ostream& zz = cout;
void fn1() { zz = cout; } // fails: operator '=' private

ofstream& zzz = file;
void fn2() { zzz = file; } // fails: operator '=' private