The author of this software is David M. Gay.

Copyright (c) 1991 by AT&T.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose without fee is hereby granted, provided that this entire notice is included in all copies of any software which is or includes a copy or modification of this software and in all copies of the supporting documentation for such software.

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6 C Input and Output

The Standard Template Library(STL) is distributed with a complete implementation of the ANSI C stdio facility. It is implemented using streambuf objects. See Wrappers for C stdio.

The stdio package is intended as a replacement for the whatever stdio is in the C library. Since stdio works best when libc is built to contain it, and that may be inconvenient, it is not installed by default.

Extensions beyond ANSI:

A stdio FILE is identical to a streambuf. Hence there is no need to worry about synchronizing C and C++ input/output--they are by definition always synchronized.
If a new streambuf sub-class (in C++) is created, use it as a FILE from C. Thus the system is extensible using the standard streambuf protocol.
Arbitrarily mix reading and writing, without having to seek in between.
Unbounded ungetc() buffer.