What is cout?

Question

It may sound silly but what is cout?I am a newbie and I just ask out of curiosity because I see it a lot lately.Is it useful?

 

Answer 1

It writes output as a byte stream. It is one of the members of iostream.

Take a look at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bzbx67e8(VS.80).aspx & http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yeecc295(VS.80).aspx for more details

Here is an example of how to use cout to print "Hello World"

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
 cout<<"Hello World\n";
 return 0;
}

Hope this helps!

Note: I really advise you to read some books about C++ since the forums won't help you learn the language.

Thanks,

Ayman Shoukry

VC++ Team

 

Answer 2

You bet!Imagine that once in a while I always have a question,thus we do C++ in the university,plus the forums I visit so as to help myself get out of this mess.Thanx for the help BTW!

Answer 3

I decided to look this up, as I'm a vb programmer trying to learn c++ myself.  What I found is that cout is an object of the class ostream (from: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/cout/), so it would inherit all of the members and member functions of the ostream class.  The members and member functions are what we call properties and methods in vb (members/properties hold data and member functions/methods are subprograms that operate on data).  I think cout is usually set to stdout, the standard output stream, which is usually set to the terminal.  I'm not yet totally sure on what a stream is... that's my next order of business!

Answer 4

>I'm not yet totally sure on what a stream is...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_(computing)

What a Stream Is
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t047d21k(VS.80).aspx

iostream Programming
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/22z6066f(VS.80).aspx

File Streams
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364404(VS.85).aspx

- Wayne