I never said io*stream support was universal, [0] I said that it provided a _consistent_ mechanism. :)

[0] I mean, it's obvious that anything that you don't get for free out of the box is bound to _not_ be universal. Edit: Actually, the thing you get out of the box when you present an instance of a non-trivial user-defined class to both printf and ostream is equally useless... unless you're debugging and are interested in the address of the instance of an object.