yeh i get this too. its cuz i like to use std::strings for stuff. to be perfectly honest i dunno why people write their own string class (ala irrlicht or audiere) or data structures rather than use the STL and std::strings. I hear a lot of crap about the STL being bloated or std::string having un-needed features or being slow, but to be honest I think this is largely over-stated. I use the STL obsessively, and have found it's very stable, and standardized(at least to some degree) across many platforms. I think(this is simply an opinion mind you...) that perhaps the reasoning behind avoiding the STL is some sort of holdover from the C days. I notice a lot of the same people use c-style file IO (seek(), read()...) and like to use things like strcmp() and substr(), also a good number of people like to allocate their own memory and use delete[] on blocks of memory and stuff like that. In "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustup(inventor of c++) he says flat out that he thinks it's safer to use OO style memory management (creators/destructors) than to do it manually. Personally, I think he's right, and i try to fully embrace OO in my code everyplace I can.
On the other hand, John Carmack for instance is known to shrug off OO in favor of doing pretty much straight classic C instead.
So clearly, there is a difference of opinions on this matter. I guess I'll do it my way, and everybody else can decide for themselves
-Ted
