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From: frei@rubmez.UUCP (Matthias Frei)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: bug or feature of cfront ?
Message-ID: <240@rubmez.UUCP>
Date: 31 Jan 89 14:02:59 GMT
Organization: Ruhr Universitaet Bochum, W-Germany
Lines: 57

I'm working with cfront 1.2.1 and found something I don't understand.
I'm trying to declare a private member function get_a of class foo
returning a pointer to a structure struct_a. 
I want this struct only to be known inside foo. So I declare it
immediately after "class foo { ". This runs into an error message:

CC  foo.C:
"foo.C", line 6: error: syntax error
"foo.C", line 8: error:  foo::get_a() type mismatch: A_STRUCT *foo::() and int foo::()
2 errors

If I declare it outside from foo. everything is all rigth.
look at the following code for an example:

-- foo.h ---
#ifdef BUG
class foo {	// This variant produces an error
#endif

typedef struct a_struct { int i; int j; } A_STRUCT;

#ifndef BUG
class foo {    // Variant without error 
#endif

  int priv_a;
  A_STRUCT struct_a;

private:
  A_STRUCT *get_a();
public:
  foo();
};

-- foo.C ---
#include "foo.h"

foo::foo() 
{ priv_a = 1; }

A_STRUCT *
foo::get_a() 
{ return & struct_a; } 


I can't see that Stroustrup's definition violates to decalre a struct inside
a class and use it by a private member. So I think it's a bug.

Any comments gracefully accepted.
Matthias Frei


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