It’s easy to screw up thread safety.
If you’re trying to format something for output (e.g. leading zeros, only 1 decimal place or whatever… you know, format specifiers in printf) you are setting a property on the stream, not on what you’re converting. So if you have a thread running that sets a format, adds something to the stream, and then unsets the format, you cannot have another thread able to come in and do something to that stream. Look out for thread unsafe cout code.
You cannot use streams for any text that may need to be translated. gettext is what everybody uses. You cannot get a page into the manual before it tells you that translators may want to change the order of what you’re printing. This goes directly against stringstream.
You need another reason? Number 2 rules it out for so much handling it’s not funny.
