[cfe-dev] Pointers to Overloaded C Functions

[Douglas Gregor]

On Jan 11, 2010, at 9:59 PM, George King <gwk.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

>>>> I am experimenting with clang's overloaded C functions, and I  
>>>> can't figure out how to get a pointer to an overloaded function.
>
>>> Umm, interesting... I think it's just some missing logic in the  
>>> code for assignments in C.  I don't think anyone considered that  
>>> someone might write code like that.
>>
>> I don't know if we even want to support that kind of code... the  
>> "overloadable" attribute is narrowly defined to help support  
>> certain weird C99-isms (*cough* tgmath.h *cough*). We don't really  
>> want to encourage widespread use, since it is likely to never be  
>> portable.
>
> Thanks for your replies, and sorry for taking so long to respond. If  
> it is valid to take the address of an overloaded function in C++,  
> then it seems reasonable to expect that one could do so with the  
> overload feature in C too. I understand that this is not a portable  
> feature, but that is no reason not fully implement it (in the sense  
> of completeness relative to C++).

Well, it's a reason not to fully implement it because a better  
implementation encourages more use.

> I certainly don't expect this to be a priority for anyone;  
> nevertheless, it seems weird to me that you could write functions  
> but not be able to get their addresses due to syntactic limitations.

I would not oppose patches that make overloadable functions more  
useful in C. But you won't see me jumping to implement them, either.

   - Doug