Defining a member function inside the class instead of outside in C++?

Question

By writing the definition of a member function inside the class in the header file as follows, I was told that compiler treats this as an inline function - hence , anywhere it e

Answer 1

I was told that compiler treats this as an inline function

Correct. That means that it's allowed to be defined in more than one translation unit, which is necessary if you want to define it in a header and include that header more than once in your program.

Hence , anywhere it encounters this function being called in the program , it enters the complete body of the function every time instead of jumping to the one location where the function resides in memory

No, that's not what inline means in the context of a function definition. That's the optimisation of function call inlining, which the compiler can apply to any call if it thinks it will improve the code.

The two concepts are loosely related: compilers which process a single translation unit at a time will only be able to apply the optimisation to functions defined in the current unit, so they'll need to have multiple definitions to be able to optimise them in more than one unit.