what good is a console program anyway??

[evil_gamer]

I have been thinking about a program for a while now and think that C++ may be the best choice to create this since there will be alot of user input.

Basicly the progam ask a set of questions then out puts what the user wants. I could do this in visual basic and probably will as a "prototype" but that could end up being a lot of windows.

But who would want a console program? Sure I would know what to do with it since I created it, but should I distribute it, would people want it? I mean there would be no buttons or windows or anything fancy like that.

Console programs, are they any good? Can or have you distributed a console program your self?

[SteveCRM]

you can if you want, console programs help people get the basics down, after that a lot of people go to windows programming. C++ is good for simple programs or function creation (in my opinion anyway)

[phinds]

console programs are very useful for quick utilities done by experience C programmers who have a built up library of functions, because they are very fast when running and very quick to develop. I have dozens that I've developed over the years and I use serveral of them every day.

If the fundamental thrust of a program is heavy lifting (sorting tens of millions of records in a flat file, for example) then console app are particularly good because they're fast.

If the fundamental thrust of an app is the user inteface, the console apps suck.

In one sense, a console app is nothting but a DOS program, and they were distributed successfully for a lot of years.

These days, if you're going to distruibute something to relatively computer-iliterate folks, you're better off with a windows app, whether generated by VB or whatever.