Design of std::ifstream class

Question

Those of us who have seen the beauty of STL try to use it as much as possible, and also encourage others to use it wherever we see them using raw pointers and a

Answer 1

Because IOStream was designed way before part of the STL was integrated in the standard library. And the string class was made after that. It was pretty late in the standardization process and modifying IOStream was not considered save.

BTW, as part of the minor but convenient changes in C++0X is there was a clean up of this kind of things.