Why doesn't the order of methods in a class matter in C++?

Question

I have been programming in C++ for quite some time and I never thought about this until today.

Consider the following code:

struct foo
{
  // compiles fi         


        

Answer 1

It has a lot to do with visibility. I think your confusion may come from assuming a single pass. Think of class parsing as done in two stages.

1. Parse class definition.
2. Parse method implementation.

The advantage to this is we have visibility of the entire class from within class member functions.