This directory contains a shotgun port of basic_stringbuf and family
to old-fashioned IOStreams. This is mainly to give users of libraries
not yet supporting the sstream the possibility to use string streams in
favour of the deprecated strstreams.

NOTE: This implementation was neither reviewed nor toroughly tested
      although the template classes were taken from my current
      IOStream implementation (current being July, 1st, 1999). Use
      on your own risk!

FILES:
  Makefile   - a makefile to compile two simple test files
  README     - this file
  iotraits.h - declaration of a traits classes used by the streams
  sstream    - forwarding header to include sstream.h
  sstream.h  - declaration of basic_stringbuf and family
  sstream.cc - implementation of the string stream classes (see below)
  tst1.cc    - a simple test program
  tst1.cc    - a simple test program

The file sstream.cc can be used to put the actual instantiation into
a library. The current setup is to pull this file in from sstream.h.
However, it is possible to provide manual instantiations which are then
put into a library. In this case, this file should not be included
by sstream.h: Just remove the corresponding include at the bottom of
sstream.h.

INSTALLATION:
  The stuff is mainly intended as a header only implementation (but
  see above). If you use it this way, it should be sufficient to
  copy the files

    iotraits.h
    sstream
    sstream.h
    sstream.cc
  
  into a location where they are searched by the C++ compiler (eg.
  /usr/local/include/g++-2).

SUPPORT:
  Well, I hope to release my full implementation of the IOStream
  library really soon now. Since the code base is identical to the full
  implementation I would appreciate bug reports and I will try to provide
  fixes (if there is a need for fixes) in a timely manner. However, since
  I'm doing this currently only in my spare time, I can't guarantee that
  I find the time to provide any support.

DOCUMENTATION:
  Sorry, no documentation for this stuff is available, not even for the
  complete stuff. You might have an occasional look at
  <http://www.claas-solutions.de/iostreams/>: The documentation will be
  added to the stuff which is already present at this location. However,
  note that this is stuff I'm currently actively work on (but I'm not
  sure how often I will upload new versions...).

TESTS:
  The two test programs are arbitrary sample programs I had when I put
  this stuff together:
    tst1  takes a number as argument, parses it and outputs this number
          plus one (don't ask me what this was supposed to demonstrate...)
    tst2  just writes the alphabet several times with lowercase and then
          several times with uppercase letters. This example triggered
	  a bug with an older version.

COMPILER:
  You probably need a rather recent compiler to compile this stuff
  successfully: I used a very recent snapshot of egcs to compile this
  stuff. I haven't tried the code with any other compiler.
