> Any reason not to use 'scanf'?

Complexity. I do not mind having scanf, but using it requires
some understanding of modules, format strings and polymorphic types. And
people are unlikely to get bothered by these as soon as they are unable to
feed numbers into their simple programs. That's the catch. Reading numbers
should hardly be more complicated than reading strings, IMHO.

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 Serge S. Bityukov, Moscow State University, Dept of Mechanics and Mathematics