CoCoA » CoCoALib

There is one aspect of the design which is not wholly satisfactory:
there is no safe way of sending logging output to a user created stream (unless that stream is in a global variable).

Consider the following:

void MyFunc()
{
  ofstream MyLogStream("cocoa.log");
  SetLogStream(MyLogStream);
  // blah blah
}

When control leaves MyFunc the stream MyLogStream will be destroyed, but the hidden global set by SetLogStream will still refer to that now defunct ofstream. The situation is also exception unsafe.

The "correct" design would be an RAII implementation: in other words functions can "redirect" the LogStream only while control remains in that function (upon function exit, LogStream reverts to its previous value). The RAII approach is surely cleaner, but would make it tricky to implement SetLogStream in CoCoA-5; would that really matter?