Original purpose of header files was to allow single-pass compilation and modularity in C. By declaring the methods before they are used, it allowed for only single compilation pass. This age is long time gone thanks to our powerfull computers being able to do multi-pass compilation without any problems, and sometimes even faster than C++ compilers.

C++ being backwards compatible with C needed to keep the header files, but added lot of on top of them, which resulted in quite problematic design. More in FQA.

For modularity, header files were needed as metadata about code in modules. Eg. what methods (and in C++ classes) are available in what library. It was obvious to have developer write this, because compile time was expensive. Nowadays, it is no problem to have compiler generate this metadata from code itself. Java and .NET languages do this normally.

So no. Header files are not good. They were when we still had to have compiler and linker on separate flopies and compilation took 30 minutes. Nowadays, they only get in the way and are sign of bad design.

Original purpose of header files was to allow single-pass compilation and modularity in C. By declaring the methods before they are used, it allowed for only single compilation pass. This age is long time gone thanks to our powerfull computers being able to do multi-pass compilation without any problems, and sometimes even faster than C++ compilers.

C++ being backwards compatible with C needed to keep the header files, but added lot of on top of them, which resulted in quite problematic design. More in FQA.

For modularity, header files were needed as metadata about code in modules. Eg. what methods (and in C++ classes) are available in what library. It was obvious to have developer write this, because compile time was expensive. Nowadays, it is no problem to have compiler generate this metadata from code itself. Java and .NET languages do this normally.

So no. Header files are not good. They were when we still had to have compiler and linker on separate floppies and compilation took 30 minutes. Nowadays, they only get in the way and are sign of bad design.

Original purpose of header files was to allow single-pass compilation and modularity in C. By declaring the methods before they are used, it allowed for only single compilation pass. This age is long time gone thanks to our powerfull computers being able to do multi-pass compilation without any problems, and sometimes even faster than C++ compilers.

C++ being backwards compatible with C needed to keep the header files, but added lot of on top of them, which resulted in quite problematic design. More in FQA.

So no. Header files are not good. They were when we still had to have compiler and linker on separate flopies and compilation took 30 minutes. Nowadays, they only get in the way and are sign of bad design.

Original purpose of header files was to allow single-pass compilation and modularity in C. By declaring the methods before they are used, it allowed for only single compilation pass. This age is long time gone thanks to our powerfull computers being able to do multi-pass compilation without any problems, and sometimes even faster than C++ compilers.

C++ being backwards compatible with C needed to keep the header files, but added lot of on top of them, which resulted in quite problematic design. More in FQA.

For modularity, header files were needed as metadata about code in modules. Eg. what methods (and in C++ classes) are available in what library. It was obvious to have developer write this, because compile time was expensive. Nowadays, it is no problem to have compiler generate this metadata from code itself. Java and .NET languages do this normally.

So no. Header files are not good. They were when we still had to have compiler and linker on separate flopies and compilation took 30 minutes. Nowadays, they only get in the way and are sign of bad design.