I was experimenting a little with the C++11 standard and came up with this problem: In C++11 you can use auto and decltype to automatically get return type for a function as, for example the begin() and end() functions below: #include <vector> template <typename T> class Container { private: std::vector<T> v; public: auto begin() -> decltype(v.begin()) { return v.begin(); }; auto end() -> decltype(v.end()) { return v.end(); }; }; My problem here is that I have to declare the private vector<T> v before the public declarations which is against my coding style. I would like to declare all my private members after my public members. You have to declare the vector before the function declaration because the expression in decltype is a call to vector member function begin() and requires an instance of the object. Is there a way around this?