Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!milano!czech!krohn
From: krohn@czech.sw.mcc.com (Eric Krohn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: function variable
Message-ID: <3988@czech.sw.mcc.com>
Date: 20 Jul 90 16:36:30 GMT
References: <10983@paperboy.OSF.ORG>
Reply-To: krohn@czech.sw.mcc.com (Eric Krohn)
Organization: MCC, Austin, Texas
Lines: 29

In article <10983@paperboy.OSF.ORG> daniel@osf.org (Daniel Dardailler) writes:
] I have a g++ problem:
] 
]   main()
]   {
]   int (*  foo) ();
]   }
] doesn't compile with:  `foo' undeclared (first use this function)

Welcome to one of the C++ language's inherent ambiguities.  A statement of
the form
	T (* foo) ();
(where T is a typename) could be either:
1) an expression 	// Dereference foo, cast it to a T, call function or
			// overloaded operator ().
2) a declaration	// foo is pointer to function returning T.

As of AT&T's C++ 2.0, the language manual says if a statement can be parsed as
either an expression or a declaration, then it must be parsed as a declaration.

In your case, g++ parsed it (incorrectly) as an expression.
When you added the storage class specifier (static), you disambiguated the
statement so that it could only be parsed as a declaration.

If you want to force your statement to be parsed as an expression, you can say
	0, int (*foo) ();
-- 
Eric J. Krohn
krohn@sw.mcc.com