Understanding the Need for Variadic Templates

Functions with variable numbers of arguments

One of the most famous C and C++ functions is printf, which writes formatted output to the stdout standard output stream. There is actually a family of functions in the I/O library for writing formatted output, which also includes fprintf (which writes to a file stream), sprint, and snprintf (which write to a character buffer). These functions are similar because they take a string defining the output format and a variable number of arguments. The language, however, provides us with the means to write our own functions with variable numbers of arguments. Here is an example of a function that takes one or more arguments and returns the minimum value: