On 15/05/2013 10:44 PM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> So I have to put the entire class definition into the header file. But
>> that means I have to put Secrets into the header file too - a data
>> structure that clients have absolutely no reason to know anything about.
>
> If having the internal-implementation-detail as a member variable of
> the class is something you just must avoid, and especially if this is
> a class that doesn't get instantiated a lot, then the solution is to
> use the Pimpl idiom, which regardless of the funny name, is exactly what
> you described. In other words, make a forward declaration of that private
> class and just have a pointer to it as member.

My next question was going to be "is there a way to expose part of a 
class so that the test framework can access it, but nothing else can?"

And then I read the documentation for our test framework [GTest, in case 
anybody cares], and it says to do basically the same thing as the above. 
IOW, make a private class, put it in its own header file, let the test 
framework include that header file, but nobody else.

Not sure if it's worth it just to hide one single method, but it might 
be useful in other parts of the codebase...

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