printf vs cin

[kkg]

This may be a stupid question but I have to ask, is there a greater advantage to printf other than formatting I should be aware of? That is there something deeper?

[Peter87]

They are used for different things.
printf is used to output text from the program.
cin is used to read input to the program.

[viliml]

I belive you meant printf vs cout. And yes, there are 2 things. FIRST: type safety. Prinf uses va_args, which can't possibly be good. Cout uses nested speciallized operators, which can't possibly be bad. SECOND: overloads. You can NEVER make anything like

struct //whatever
{
//whatwhateverever
} whatwhatwhatevereverever;

int main()
{
//whatwhatwhat... well, you get the point :)
printf("%blah", whatwhatwhatevereverever);
//whatwhatwhawhat... OMG why am I even doing this?!?!!?
}

but overloading the stream insertion/extraction is easy!

[modoran]

cout add 500kb to executable size, this is only disavantage I can think of over printf.

[kbw]

printf is hard coded to support the built in types.

C++ allows the creation of user defined types. And cout, well istream/ostream actually, allow I/O on user defined types.