Question

I want to create a member function with the same name of the returning type. Example:

class A { };

class B {
public:
    A& A() { return *a; }
private:
    A* a;
};

However, the compiler won’t let me. I tried to change the type of the member return type to ::A (as sugested here, but with no avail. I know I could just change the member name, but I just want to understand why does it has this restriction, and what are my workarounds.

Answer 1

If you declare a member called A you can no longer use the type A without an explicit namespace. You need to change every occurrence of the type A to ::A.

The corrected code looks like:

class A { };

class B {
    public:
        ::A& A() { return *a; }
    private:
        ::A* a;
};

Fixed code on codepad:

http://codepad.org/cilF9rKm