If you try to cout a volatile pointer, even a volatile char pointer where you would normally expect cout to print the string, you will instead simply get '1' (assuming the pointer is not null I think). I assume output stream operator<< is template specialized for volatile pointers, but my question is, why? What use case motivates this behavior?

Example code:

#include <iostream>
#include <cstring>

int main()
{
    char x[500];
    std::strcpy(x, "Hello world");

    int y;
    int *z = &y;

    std::cout << x << std::endl;
    std::cout << (char volatile*)x << std::endl;

    std::cout << z << std::endl;
    std::cout << (int volatile*)z << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

Output:

Hello world
1
0x8046b6c
1