Standard C++ Library: IO Streams

* spent the day essentially learning C++ streams. Many things to keep in mind:

* I/O and parsing in C++ is a tedious task!! Almost everything has to be done by hand. It can be very buggy code, hard to maintain...

* 2 basics levels of functionality: the >> operators are for very simple tasks and parsing, for common situations. But should you need to write complex or even non trivial I/O, you need to learn about member functions (get, getline, etc... and a ton of other things)

* It may thus be worth it to learn the Boost parsing library or the Boost regexp library

* Only practice can help remember the many issues associated with I/O streams, I think.

* the C++ parashift FAQ is really well documented, bookmarked it.

* Learnt about friends, inline functions should be declared in the implementation

* Headers are not meant to disallow access to your classes, it is first a tools for the programmer, not a security measure

* downloaded a C++ Standard Library book

* wrote a test function to read graph from a file using a simple language; needs to be finished and debugged

-> finish to debug the io code

-> write a random potential and / or random variable generator

-> previous goals of yesterday