Sure, strtok is a terrible misfeature, a relic of ancient times, but it's plainly the heritage of C, not C++ (just like e.g. strcpy). The C++ problems are things like braced initialization list having different meaning depending on the set of available constructors, or the significantly non-zero cost of various abstractions, caused by strange backward-compatible limitations of the standard/ABI definitions, or the distinctness of vector<bool> etc.