## CGAL::Mode

### Definition

All classes in the CGAL kernel provide input and output operators for IOStreams. The basic task of such an operator is to produce a representation of an object that can be written as a sequence of characters on devices as a console, a file, or a pipe. The enum Mode distinguish between three different printing formats.

In ASCII mode, numbers e.g. the coordinates of a point or the coefficients of a line, are written in a machine independent format. In BINARY mode, data are written in a binary format, e.g. a double is represented as a sequence of four byte. The format depends on the machine. The mode PRETTY serves mainly for debugging as the type of the geometric object is written, as well as the data defining the object. For example for a point at the origin with Cartesian double coordinates, the output would be PointC2(0.0, 0.0). At the moment CGAL does not provide input operations for pretty printed data. By default a stream is in ASCII mode.

enum Mode { ASCII = 0 , BINARY , PRETTY };

### See Also

CGAL::set_mode
CGAL::set_ascii_mode
CGAL::set_binary_mode
CGAL::set_pretty_mode
CGAL::get_mode
CGAL::is_ascii
CGAL::is_binary
CGAL::is_pretty