Question

I would like to be able to achieve something like this:

class Zot {     namespace A     {         static int x;         static int y;     }     } 

I am working with a legacy system that uses code generation heavily off a DB schema, and certain fields are exposed as methods/variables in the class definition. I need to add a few extra static variables to these classes and would like to guarantee no clashes with the existing names.

The best I have come up with is to use another struct to wrap the statics as if it were a namespace:

class Zot {     struct A     {         static int x;         static int y;     }     } 

Is there a better way?

Update:

An extra requirement is to be able to access these from a template elsewhere

e.g.

template<class T> class B {   void foo() { return T::A::x; } }; 

So putting them in a separate class won’t work

Answer 1

Really the inner struct is your best bet. Another possibility would be to use a typedef to bring in a class of statics. This works well for code generation in that you can separate the extras from the generated code:

In the generated file that doesn’t care at all what’s in Zot_statics:

class Zot_statics;     class Zot { public:     typedef Zot_statics A;      int x; // This is ok }; 

In a hand-maintained header for when you need to access x and y:

class Zot_statics { public:     static int x;     static int y; }; 

In a hand-maintained cpp file:

int Zot_statics::x; int Zot_statics::y; 

And your template should work just fine with Zot::X referring to the instance variable X on Zot, and Zot::A::x refering to the static variable.