Question

I’ve been working lately on a small project, and I couldn’t figure out something..

I’ve been given a .h file that was containing a class, using a typename template. Inside that class there was a private class.

template <typename T>
class Something
{
public:
        Something();
        ~Something();

        Node* Function1(int index);
        int Index(const T& id);


private:
        class Node()
        {
                public:
                T id;

                //Imagine the rest for the Node


        };      
};

The problem occured when I wanted to define the functions of the class “Something”

Here’s how I was doing it (in a .inl file)

template<typename T>
Node* Something::Function1(int index) //Is the return type well written?
{
        // returns the node at the specified index
}

template<typename T>
int Something::Index(const T& id) //Is the parameter type well specified?
{
        // returns the index of the node with the specified id
}

So the bugging part was in the definitions part… Do I have to tell the compiler that the return type (in this case Node*) uses the typename template (like this: typename Node*) ? And what about the parameter ? typename const Node& ?

So basically, when do I have to specify wether the function/parameter uses a template?

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

template<typename T>
typename Something<T>::Node * Something::Function1(int index) //Is the return type well written?
{
        // returns the node at the specified index
}