Why std::cout instead of simply cout?

Question

I get these error messages for all cout and endl:

main.cc:17:5: error: ‘cout’ was not declared in this scope
main.cc:17:5: note: sugges         


        

Answer 1

You probably had using namespace std; before in your code you did in class. That explicitly tells the precompiler to look for the symbols in std, which means you don't need to std::. Though it is good practice to std::cout instead of cout so you explicitly invoke std::cout every time. That way if you are using another library that redefines cout, you still have the std::cout behavior instead of some other custom behavior.