Class name does not name a type in C++

error 'Class' does not name a type

Just in case someone does the same idiotic thing I did ... I was creating a small test program from scratch and I typed Class instead of class (with a small C). I didn't take any notice of the quotes in the error message and spent a little too long not understanding my problem.

My search for a solution brought me here so I guess the same could happen to someone else.

The preprocessor inserts the contents of the files A.h and B.h exactly where the include statement occurs (this is really just copy/paste). When the compiler then parses A.cpp, it finds the declaration of class A before it knows about class B. This causes the error you see. There are two ways to solve this:

1. Include B.h in A.h. It is generally a good idea to include header files in the files where they are needed. If you rely on indirect inclusion though another header, or a special order of includes in the compilation unit (cpp-file), this will only confuse you and others as the project gets bigger.

2. If you use member variable of type B in class A, the compiler needs to know the exact and complete declaration of B, because it needs to create the memory-layout for A. If, on the other hand, you were using a pointer or reference to B, then a forward declaration would suffice, because the memory the compiler needs to reserve for a pointer or reference is independent of the class definition. This would look like this:

   class B; // forward declaration        
   class A {
   public:
       A(int id);
   private:
       int _id;
       B & _b;
   };
   

   This is very useful to avoid circular dependencies among headers.

I hope this helps.