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copied!<p>In general, you should probably prefer free functions. Think about it from an OOP perspective.</p> <p>If the function does not need access to any private members, then why should it be <em>given</em> access to them? That's not good for encapsulation. It means more code that may potentially fail when the internals of the class is modified.</p> <p>It also limits the possible amount of code reuse.</p> <p>If you wrote the function as something like this:</p> <pre><code>template <typename T> bool getSelectedDocs(T& container, std::vector<Doc*>&); </code></pre> <p>Then the same implementation of getSelectedDocs will work for <em>any</em> class that exposes the required functions, not just your DocContainer.</p> <p>Of course, if you don't like templates, an interface could be used, and then it'd still work for any class that implemented this interface.</p> <p>On the other hand, if it is a member function, then it'll only work for this particular class (and possibly derived classes).</p> <p>The C++ standard library follows the same approach. Consider <code>std::find</code>, for example, which is made a free function for this precise reason. It doesn't need to know the internals of the class it's searching in. It just needs <em>some</em> implementation that fulfills its requirements. Which means that the same <code>find()</code> implementation can work on any container, in the standard library or elsewhere.</p> <p>Scott Meyers argues for the <a href="http://www.ddj.com/cpp/184401197" rel="nofollow noreferrer">same thing</a>.</p> <p>If you don't like it cluttering up your main namespace, you can of course put it into a separate namespace with functionality for this particular class.</p>

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