why do we need to put private members in headers
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Simon
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Published on 2012-04-10T09:25:03Z
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2012/04/10
11:40 UTC
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Private variables are a way to hide complexity and implementation details to the user of a class. This is a rather nice feature. But I do not understand why in c++ we need to put them in the header of a class. I see some annoying downsides to this:
- it clutters the header from the user
- it force recompilation of all client libraries whenever the internals are modified
Is there a conceptual reason behind this requirement? Is it only to ease the work of the compiler?
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