Re: Problem forward declaration of "typedef struct"

From:
"s5n" <stephan@s11n.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
19 Feb 2007 03:38:19 -0800
Message-ID:
<1171885099.616008.8340@p10g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>
On Feb 19, 12:05 pm, "Mohammad Omer Nasir" <momer...@gmail.com> wrote:

But i defined AA specifically for making Objects and LPAA for
specifically pointer of A structure... i want to know the behavior of
"typedef struct" type structures, when we need to forward declaration
of it...


i can't answer that question, but i feel compelled to point out that
what you did here:

when i tried to write forward declaration code of structure A
in Temp.h header file which is

....

is NOT a forward declaration. You redefined the whole class. A forward
declaration takes ONLY the name of the class and no members, like
this:

class CTemp;

But there are limitations of what a forward decl can do. For example,
if you only have a type available via a forward decl then it is an
"incomplete type" and you cannot call functions on it:

class Foo;
....
Foo foo = Foo(); // illegal because Foo ctor not visible
....
Foo * foo = new Foo(); // same
....
foo->bar(); // illegal because Foo::bar() is not visible

But a fwd decl is okay for some purposes, like declaring a function
which takes a pointer or reference to that type:

void myFunction( CTemp const & ); // legal

or as part of a class:

class Foo;
class XYZ {
....
private:
  Foo * m_foo; // legal
  Foo m_bar; // NOT legal because Foo is incomplete
};

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