Definition of friend functions inside a namespace

A.h

#ifndef _A_H_
#define _A_H_

#include <iostream>

// A.h
using namespace std;

namespace test{
	class A{
	public:
		friend ostream &operator<<(ostream &cout, const A &a);
	};
}

#endif

A.cpp

#include "A.h"

using namespace test;

ostream &operator<<(ostream &cout, const A &a){
	cout << "a";
	return cout;
}

main.cpp

#include <iostream>
#include "A.h"

using namespace test;

int main(){
	A a;
	cout << a << endl;
	return 0;
}

The three files briefly show what I ran into today.

I declared a friend function of class A inside namespace test, and tried to define it like what I wrote in A.cpp. But the linker failed to find the overloaded operator<<.

And finally I found actually test::operator<<  is to be called while "using namespace test" won't apply on "operator<<" when you define it.

The correct A.cpp should be like this for both minGW and MSVC Compiler.

#include "A.h"

using namespace test;

namespace test{
	ostream &operator<<(ostream &cout, const A &a){
		cout << "a";
		return cout;
	}
}

This will work for MSVC Compiler too.

#include "A.h"

using namespace test;

ostream &test::operator<<(ostream &cout, const A &a){
	cout << "a";
	return cout;
}

It seems that operators exist with a unique identifier in every namespace. So when I wrote operator<<, it refers to that one of the default namespace instead of the namespace test.