Question

I was reading some code from the Doom 3 SDK ( in a VS solution ) when I found a header like this:

#ifndef __PLAYERICON_H__
#define __PLAYERICON_H__

    class idPlayerIcon {
        public:
            idPlayerIcon();
            ~idPlayerIcon();

        ...... // omitted

        public:
            playerIconType_t    iconType;
            renderEntity_t      renderEnt;
            qhandle_t       iconHandle;

        };

#endif  /* !_PLAYERICON_H_ */

The header has no forward class declaration nor #includes so, in my experience it should lead to an error like: Undeclared Identifier or Syntax error, cause renderEntity_t and qhandle_t are not “seen”.
So how can this compile correctly?
Thank you in advance for the answers.

Answer 1

Because every time it is included, the needed entities are forward declared/included right before it, so everything is defined at the point of inclusion. As you correctly say, it will not work any other way.