Question

How would you declare a friend ostream operator overload in the .h file of a class Complex (so in Complex.h)?

a) In the public section.
b) In the private section.
c) It's not possible to declare it in the .h file.
d) In the protected section.

Answer 1

To declare a friend ostream operator overload for a class Complex in the Complex.h file, it should be placed in the public section. This allows external functions to access private and protected members for output operations without being a member function of the class itself.

Step-by-step explanation:

To declare an overloaded friend ostream operator in the header file (Complex.h) of a class Complex, you should place the declaration in the public section of the class. This is because the overloaded operator will need to be invoked by functions that are not members of the class, such as the ostream functions, which are part of the standard library.

The declaration in the Complex.h file would look something like this:

class Complex {
public:
// Other members and functions
friend std::ostream & operator<<(std::ostream & out, const Complex& c);
};This allows the operator<< to access the private and protected members of the Complex class in order to output them to the stream. It's important to note that despite being in the public section, the friend function is not a member function of the class, and thus does not have the this pointer.