------- Additional Comments From jamesp at trdlnk dot com 2005-01-24 14:03 ------- According to paragraph 7 of section 14.7.2 in the C++ standard, this is supposed to work as I described.
I admit that the sample code I supplied doesn't show why this functionality is necessary, so I'll try to explain my motivation. I'm writing a library that defines a template class that is supposed to be specialized by client code. There is no default implementation for the template class member functions. I consider the implementation of the template class a detail related to this library and don't want to force the client to litter header files with these details. The header files for the library contain enough of the details to generate the necessary function calls properly without forcing the user to define the specialized template class member functions in a special location. My recommendation to the users is to define the specialization in a .cc file, explicitly extantiate the class, and link in the code as necessary rather than create special header files. In short, it's just a lot cleaner and easier for the clients to maintain. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19569
