Static member functions

Question

After reading sbi and Eli Bendersky\'s answers in this question I started to wondering what static member functions are for.

A class\' friend free function shouldn\'

Answer 1

Often, frankly, you shouldn't. Free functions are vastly under-rated.

The implicit "namespacing" you get from using a static member (pretending that the class is nothing more than a namespace for the static member, which is sort of true) is the only benefit that I can think of.

If the static function member needs persistent variables, the ability to have static data members along with it might also be useful.