CompuServe Messages

The way I understand it, there was a decision not to allow partial definitions of a class, which is what you are doing when you declare a member function of an as yet undefined class as a friend. I'm not a compiler writer, but possibly this creates error checking problems if you fail to declare that function as a member later, or you declare it differently. If you fail to define a non-member function which you declare a friend to a class, the linker gives you the error (if you attempt to use the function). Whatever the reason, thats the way it is…