Because cin can leave a terminating character in the stream, not using the cin.ignore() and cin.get() functions could cause small problems with your code. The user gets to see what is being written to the screen after they enter the values, as it can be seen here:

#include using namespace std;int main () {      int a,b,max;      cout  a;    cout  b;       //remove the terminating character   std::cin.ignore();    if( ab ) {max=a;}        else {max=b;}      cout      //Extracts characters from the stream   std::cin.get();   return 0;}