Sorry if you saw this om .lang.c++. It did not pick up there, but the q-n
has been bothering me for some time.
Can anyone justify the compiler's behavoir here?(using vc++6)

<Flc2199>
>>I heard there was a bug MS Visual C++ 6.0 compiler that did not >>allow
for friend functions to access private member varibles in >>classes. Is this
true?

<me>
I do not know about private vars,
but I had a problem with privately declared nested structs:

class Outer
{
    struct Inner
    {
    };
public:
    friend ostream& operator<<(ostream&, Inner&);
};
ostream& operator<<(ostream& out, Outer::Inner&)
{
 return out;
}

gets
error C2248: 'Inner' : cannot access private struct declared in class
'Outer'
        D:\users\max\sandbox\ciffile\main.cpp(41) : see declaration of
'Inner'
from VC++6.

So does
class Outer
{
    struct Inner
    {
  friend ostream& operator<<(ostream&, Inner&);
    };
public:

};
ostream& operator<<(ostream& out, Outer::Inner&)
{
 return out;
}

And finally
class Outer
{
    struct Inner
    {
    };
public:
    friend ostream& operator<<(ostream&, Outer::Inner&);
};
ostream& operator<<(ostream& out, Outer::Inner&)
{
 return out;
}
Go figure!
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