C++ - how does Sleep() and cin work?

Question

Just curious. How does actually the function Sleep() work (declared in windows.h)? Maybe not just that implementation, but anyone. With that I mean - how is it implemented? How

Answer 1

'cin' uses a ton of overloaded operators. The '>>', which is usually right bit-shift, is overloaded for pretty much every type of right-hand operand in C++. A separate function is provided for each one, which reads from the console and converts the input into whichever variable type you have given. For example:

std::cin::operator>> (int &rhs);

That's not real C++ — I haven't worked with streams and overloading in a while, so I don't remember the return type or the exact order of arguments. Nevertheless, this function is called when you run cin >> an integer variable.

The exact underlying implementation depends on the operating system.