Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!warwick!nott-cs!gas
From: gas@cs.nott.ac.uk (Alan Shepherd)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: extern "C"
Message-ID: <1990Oct5.090712.7318@cs.nott.ac.uk>
Date: 5 Oct 90 09:07:12 GMT
Reply-To: gas@cs.nott.ac.uk (Alan Shepherd)
Organization: Nottingham University
Lines: 14

Can someone explain the rational behind the fact that 

	extern "C" foo();

doesn't do what you'd expect (i.e. declare a function foo which has c
linkage and as in pre-ANSI C, any number of arguments) but declares a C
function with no arguments so that a call to foo("hello") for example
results in an unexpected argument error ?  If the ansi option is
specified to C++, this makes more sense, but it behaves exactly the same
without the ansi option.  This makes it impossible to use old-style C
header files without editting them which I thought the introduction of
extern "C" was supposed to facilitate.

Alan Shepherd