c++ - Why use conio.h?

Question

I often see people use the header file of conio.h in C and C++, although I can′t see any major benefits in use of the functions inside of conio.h in comparison to the standard library functions. conio.h has furthermore the disadvantages of being dependent on the Windows/MS-DOS environment and not being part of the C standard.

• What is the reason to choose functions of conio.h?
• What do functions inside of conio.h provide, what the functions of the standard C libraries can't?
• Why to choose the conio library?

Answer 1

The conio.h header is specific to Turbo C, which predates the earliest C standard by several years. It contains routines that are specific to the DOS command line. One function here that's frequently used is getch, which allows reading one character at a time without having to press the Enter key. It also contains gotoxy which allows placing the cursor at a specific location in the terminal

Generally speaking, methods of communicating with the terminal like this are very OS specific, so each has their own (typically non-portable) way of doing it.

This contrasts with the functions in stdio.h which contain functions like printf, scanf, and getchar which work regardless of what type of console is in use.