This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 116a. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-12-19

482. Qualified declarators in redeclarations

[Voted into the WP at the February, 2012 meeting; moved to DR at the October, 2012 meeting.]

According to 9.3.4 [dcl.meaning] paragraph 1,

A declarator-id shall not be qualified except for the definition of a member function (11.4.2 [class.mfct]) or static data member (11.4.9 [class.static]) outside of its class, the definition or explicit instantiation of a function or variable member of a namespace outside of its namespace, or the definition of a previously declared explicit specialization outside of its namespace, or the declaration of a friend function that is a member of another class or namespace (11.8.4 [class.friend]). When the declarator-id is qualified, the declaration shall refer to a previously declared member of the class or namespace to which the qualifier refers...

This restriction prohibits examples like the following:

    void f();
    void ::f();        // error: qualified declarator

    namespace N {
      void f();
      void N::f() { }  // error: qualified declarator
    }

There doesn't seem to be any good reason for disallowing such declarations, and a number of implementations accept them in spite of the Standard's prohibition. Should the Standard be changed to allow them?

Notes from the April, 2006 meeting:

In discussing issue 548, the CWG agreed that the prohibition of qualified declarators inside their namespace should be removed.

Proposed resolution (October, 2006):

Remove the indicated words from 9.3.4 [dcl.meaning] paragraph 1:

...An unqualified-id occurring in a declarator-id shall be a simple identifier except for the declaration of some special functions (11.4.8 [class.conv], 11.4.7 [class.dtor], 12.4 [over.oper]) and for the declaration of template specializations or partial specializations (13.9 [temp.spec]). A declarator-id shall not be qualified except for the definition of a member function (11.4.2 [class.mfct]) or static data member (11.4.9 [class.static]) outside of its class, the definition or explicit instantiation of a function or variable member of a namespace outside of its namespace, or the definition of a previously declared explicit specialization outside of its namespace, or the declaration of a friend function that is a member of another class or namespace (11.8.4 [class.friend]). When the declarator-id is qualified, the declaration shall refer to a previously declared member of the class or namespace to which the qualifier refers, and the member shall not have been introduced by a using-declaration in the scope of the class or namespace nominated by the nested-name-specifier of the declarator-id...

[Drafting note: The omission of “outside of its class” here does not give permission for redeclaration of class members; that is still prohibited by 11.4 [class.mem] paragraph 1. The removal of the enumeration of the kinds of declarations in which a qualified-id can appear does allow a typedef declaration to use a qualified-id, which was not permitted before; if that is undesirable, the prohibition can be reinstated here.]