c++ vs c

c++ vs c

Posted Mar 27, 2008 15:13 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
In reply to: c++ vs c by jimparis
Parent article: Striking gold in binutils

I suppose some manual page for ifstream would be most appropriate, but I don't seem to have it.

All Glibc standard library functions have man pages (I'm unsure whether these came before or after the shell functions' man pages). I think this might be related to the founding philosophy that C is supposed to be portable, and the man pages were a convenient way of distributing documentation on the system call interfaces without having to decipher C code you've never seen before (not impossible, but time-consuming).

I can't recall ever seeing a C++ man page, but then again, the whole language standard was in limbo up until its 1998 ISO standardization. Not sure why they don't exist nowadays, but perhaps Stroustrup would prefer that you buy his book instead (stupid conspiracy theory). Some of the top links in Google searches for various C++ functions and standard library classes are quite decent (IMO).

Personally, I recommend anyone trying to "dive into" C++ go find a used C++ textbook. Just be sure to get one dated more recent than 1998 (because older C++ texts are rife with code that predates the ISO standard).

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