Phlip said:
I'm sure we don't have to explain why these stink too.
They are too terse to be useful. They are just the ISO definitions of each
method, printed out like a reference. Here's 'cout':
cout
extern ostream cout;
The object controls insertions to the standard output as a byte stream.
To actually beat use out of 'cout', a novice would need complete examples.
Sigh. The first step for using any reference material is to look it over
so that you understand its organization and its target audience. You're
right that our documentation isn't written for novices. You're wrong
that it stinks. Your description is quite misleading; I won't speculate
on whether that's from malice or ignorance. There's far more descriptive
information than in the ISO standard. On the other hand, in many cases
it's deliberately terse, because that's all that's needed. If you read
what our documentation says about "standard output", "byte stream", and
you'll know exactly what that description of cout means. Finding the
descriptions of those terms isn't hard: they're hot links in the
descriptive text that you quoted, although for some reason you didn't
mention that.