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### 178. Should clog and cerr initially be tied to cout?

Section: 29.4.3 [narrow.stream.objects] Status: NAD Submitter: Judy Ward Opened: 1999-07-02 Last modified: 2016-01-28

Priority: Not Prioritized

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Discussion:

Section 27.3.1 says "After the object cerr is initialized, cerr.flags() & unitbuf is nonzero. Its state is otherwise the same as required for ios_base::init (lib.basic.ios.cons). It doesn't say anything about the the state of clog. So this means that calling cerr.tie() and clog.tie() should return 0 (see Table 89 for ios_base::init effects).

Neither of the popular standard library implementations that I tried does this, they both tie cerr and clog to &cout. I would think that would be what users expect.

Rationale:

The standard is clear as written.

27.3.1/5 says that "After the object cerr is initialized, cerr.flags() & unitbuf is nonzero. Its state is otherwise the same as required for ios_base::init (27.4.4.1)." Table 89 in 27.4.4.1, which gives the postconditions of basic_ios::init(), says that tie() is 0. (Other issues correct ios_base::init to basic_ios::init().)