Yeah, I always wondered was << just an ill advised attempt to show off operator overloading (I’m sure things had it before C++, but it definitely wasn’t commonplace). It never made much sense to me.
They were adding features to the language (e.g., "Koenig lookup") in the CFront era to accommodate iostreams.
I was sad that they were spending a bunch of resources on that relatively useless stuff, rather than a sorely needed set of standard collection classes, not to mention a string class. And by "standard" I don't mean actual standards -- it was far too early in the game for that -- but even just enough to get by.
Re:Pprint: Pretty Printer for Modern C++
by dearrifling on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @05:52AM
(#19786478)
ADL is important for customization points in modern C++.
So making an object for printing probably helps with scope issues like that.