Re: int main(void) is better than int main()

From:
LR <lruss@superlink.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:37:19 -0500
Message-ID:
<4780f51d$0$16320$cc2e38e6@news.uslec.net>
James Kanze wrote:

On Jan 6, 1:02 am, Tim H <thoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Jan 4, 11:59 am, James Kanze <james.ka...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's generally a lot easier with cout. About the only
printf formatting I know that you can't easily achieve with
ostream is the ' ' modifier, i.e.: "% d".


"can't achieve" or "can't easily achieve" ?


Can't achieve directly. You can achieve anything if you format
into an std::ostringstream, and then do padding, etc. manually.


Isn't this, or can't this be, assuming int x;

std::cout << (x >= 0 ? std::string(' ') : std::string());
std::cout << x;

Or have I missed something?

You *can* simulate printf formatting with ostream today,
although why you would want to? Boost::format supports almost
all of the printf formatters (I think the ' ' flag is one of the


It also lacks the * formatter, which hurts me.


What do you mean by "the * formatter"? The only place you can
use a '*' in a format specification of printf is for width and
precision. From what I understand of boost::format (but
admittedly, I've never used it), it allows all of the normal
manipulators as well, so you can use setw() and setprecision()
to achieve the same effect as the '*'. (setprecision() will
affect all of the following variables, where as ".*" won't, so
they effect isn't exactly the same.)


And even if it is lacking, there's always code like this, no matter how
annoying and bad it might be,

std::string df(const unsigned int width) {
     std::ostringstream ox;
     ox << "%" << width << "d\n";
     return ox.str();
}
....
printf(df(5).c_str(),x);
....

Another thing which I think is lacking, however, is precision of
an int or a string, e.g. printf( "%-10.8s|%5.3d",
"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", 2 ) will output:
    "abcdefgh | 002"
From what I've seen, however, most people don't actually know
the embedded language used by printf very well, and aren't aware
of such features to begin with.

common things I do:

     printf("%3d: %#08x\n", x, y);

     std::cout << boost::format("%3d: %#08x\n") %x %y;

How do you do this easily with plain old cout?


    std::cout << std::setw( 3 ) << x
              << Gabi::HexFmt( 8, ios::showbase ) << y << '\n' ;

Except that I'd usually write:

    std::cout << std::setw( 3 ) << x
              << "0x" << Gabi::HexFmt( 8, ios::uppercase ) << y <<
'\n' ;


I'm not familiar with 'Gabi'. Is that part of the standard?

Adding to the snippet above,
    const int x = 123;
    const int y = 0xabcd;

my compiler produces,
123: 0x00abcd
for the OP's printf statement. I can't tell from reading the only draft
copy of a C standard I have, but I'm going to guess that the '%#08x'
format width calculations include the '0x'. Assuming that in the OPs
snippet x and y were meant to be int and sizeof(int) is 4 and the number
of bits per char is 8, I wonder if the OP meant '%#010x'?

So using plain old cout, what's wrong with,

std::cout
     << std::dec
     << std::setw(3)
     << x
     << ": "
     << (y == 0 ? std::string() : std::string("0x")) << std::setfill('0')
     << std::setw(6) // or std::setw(8) if you wanted 8 hex digits
     << std::hex
     << y
     << std::endl;

since I prefer the format "0x0000ABCD" for hex.


I suppose it would be superfluous to mention std::uppercase.

I'm not sure I understood the OP's question or your response. What am I
missing, please?

LR

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