On 6/5/11 1:29 PM, Gregory Crosswhite wrote:
On a more serious note, though, is there a trick one can use to write I/O operators like the ones I defined above without necessarily pulling in <iostream>? I am of course aware of the existence of forward declarations, but unless my understanding of them is wrong (and hopefully it is :-) ) they cause compiler errors when the forward declared class has already been actually declared, so using forward declarations would break in the case that the user had already pulled in <iostream> before the forward declarations appeared.
Doh! It turns out that my misunderstanding came from the fact that the forward declaration class ostream; is a special case where ostream is a *typedef* rather than a class. Replacing this with ==================== namespace std { template<typename _CharT> class char_traits; template<typename _CharT, typename _Traits> class basic_ostream; } ... std::basic_ostream<char,std::char_traits<char> > ... ... ==================== seems so far to work like a charm! Cheers, Greg