Question

I was just wondering why the member functions tellg() defined in basic_istream<> class and tellp() defined in basic_ostream<> class have different names. Is that because basic_fstream<> is derived from basic_istream<> and basic_ostream<> ?

Answer 1

And how would you distinguish them in bidirectional streams,
like std::fstream or std::stringstream? Streams are allowed
to maintain separate pointers for input and output: fstream
doesn’t, but stringstream does. So you need either a flag to
indicate which one you want (as is the case in streambuf), or
you need two separate functions.