I'm trying to return a SDL Mix_Music data type, but I'm having problems.

Question

I know I could just make all the Mix_Musics public, and not worry about the problem, but I'd still like to understand how to do it.

   //header.h

    class Music
    {
        private:

         Mix_Music * BGMusic, * fall, * reset, * teleport, * win, * singleCubeWin;

        public:

         Music();

         bool loadMusic();
         void clean_up();

         Mix_Music * getSound( Mix_Music * m ) { return m; }
    };


   //program.cpp

    Music Sound;

    int main( int argc, char* args[] )
    {
        ...

        Mix_PlayMusic( Sound.getSound( "BGMusic" ), -1 );

        ...
    }

Answer 1

From your code above I'm not absolutely certain what you are trying to do. The function 'getSound' takes a Mix_Music object as the parameter and returns the same object. Now from some deduction I assume that you are trying to request the BGMusic object via a string. There a few ways to do this, via IDs for each of Mix_Music objects, request by ID.:

... // Somewhere above:

enum MixMusicID {
    BGMUSIC,
    FALL,
    RESET,
    TELEPORT,
    WIN,
    SINGLECUBEWIN
};

... // In the class:

Mix_Music * getMusic ( MixMusicID id )
{
    switch (id)
    {
    case BGMUSIC:
     return BGMusic;
     ...
    default:
     return NULL;
    }
}

... // In main:
Mix_PlayMusic( Sound.getSound( BGMUSIC ), -1 );

You could do it similarly with string identifiers for each object. What it really comes down to is there is no built in relationship between a variable's name and a string identifier. So its up to you to implement this relationship either via an enum (above) or string identifiers.

Hope this helped, again not sure exactly what the question was.