Possible Duplicate:
Should I use printf in my C++ code?
If I just want to print a string on screen, I can do that using those two ways:
printf("abc");
std::cout << "abc" << std::endl;
The case is, and in the examples shown above, is there an advantage of using printf over std::cout, or, vice versa?
Answer
While cout is the proper C++ way, I believe that some people and companies (including Google) continue to use printf in C++ code because it is much easier to do formatted output with printf than with cout.
Here's an interesting example that I found here.
Compare:
printf( "%-20s %-20s %5s\n" , "Name" , "Surname" , "Id" );
and
cout << setw( -20 ) << "Name" << setw( 20 ) << "Surname" << setw( 5 ) << "Id" << endl;