Question

Consider this code:

namespace foo {}

class A
{
   class B
   {
   };

   friend int foo::bar( B& );
};

namespace foo
{
   int bar( A::B& )
   {
   }
}

G++ 4.4.3 tells me:

friendfun-innerclass.cpp:21: error: ‘int foo::bar(A::B&)’ should have
been declared inside ‘foo’

But I can’t declare:

namespace foo
{
   int bar( A::B& );
}

before the class A definition because A::B hasn’t been declared. And I can’t declare “class A::B” obviously, to declare class B I have to give the definition of class A, and as far as I know the “friend” declarations have to be inside the definition of class A.

What’s strange to me is that if I take function “bar()” out of namespace foo everything works fine. It seems counterintuitive to me that having a function inside a namespace or not inside a namespace changes whether the compiler will accept a friend function declaration in the class.

Does anybody know of a way to proprerly structure all the declarations and such to get this to work?

Answer 1

Can’t be done the way you want to, because you would have to forward declare a nested class (which you can’t) in order to provide a prototype for foo::bar.

As a first attempt to get around this problem, I would probably resort to making foo::bar a function template. That way the compiler will resolve the types after A and B are known.

Test harness:

namespace foo
{
    template<class B> int bar(B&);
};

class A
{
   class B
   {
       template<class B> friend int foo::bar( B& );
       int n_;
   public:
       B() : n_(42) {}
   };

public:
    B b_;
};

template<class B> int foo::bar(B& b)
{
    return b.n_;
}

int main()
{
    A a;
    foo::bar(a.b_);
}