Oh yeah, printf has an option for padding the output too. (The problem with always figuring out the logic yourself is you sometimes completely forget avout some of the other options available that do the work for you, lol.) I still enourage learning programmers to figure stuff like that out. After all, someone has to know how to implement that logic, else who'll implement our printf() padding and our setw() and so on?

As for the comment about C++ being bloated, that really depends on what you mean by bloated, but for a lot of modern software need, you can easily end up with binaries that actually execute faster if you write it taking advantage of C++ features than using plain C. (And this is coming from a plain C fan, don't care for C++ much.)

Aside: Sometimes classes don't let you use the C stuff, and insist you use the C++ alternatives. I've had courses where the teacher demanded you used iostream and co. and nothing from stdio.h. I thought it was ******ed too.r