What is friend ostream

Question

I\'m a bit confused about what exactly this line of code means in my header file.

friend ostream & operator << (ostream &, const something &         


        

Answer 1

That line of code says that the operator << is a friend of something (since it's listed in the something class definition). This means that that operator << function can access the variables inside there.

The & here as the parameters mean that you pass in objects when calling the method and those parameters will just be another name for those parameter objects. Returning ostream & means that you're going to return the ostream parameter so that you can connect << expressions together avoiding creating a new "cout" when using the one global cout is what is needed.