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From: steve@harvard.UUCP ( Pratap)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: ANSI C and function prototypes
Message-ID: <681@harvard.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Feb-86 15:01:19 EST
Article-I.D.: harvard.681
Posted: Tue Feb  4 15:01:19 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Feb-86 05:15:28 EST
Reply-To: steve@harvard.UUCP (Kaufer - Lopez - Pratap)
Organization: Aiken Comp Lab, Harvard
Lines: 29


	Here is a short question regarding the new ANSI standard and 
function prototypes.

	Let's say I want to write a 'dispatcher' routine that is 
passed a code number and a pointer to a function to call.
I wish to use a prototype to make sure that I am always passing 
two arguments, the first of which is an int and the 
second of which is a function pointer.  
	I might define the prototype as:

	dispatcher(int code, void (*disp_func)());

	My problem is that under the standard it will always be an error to 
call this routine with a pointer to a function that does NOT return void.

	Is there any way to prototype the second argument as a pointer to
a function returning 'anything'?  I realize if I prototype the second
argument as a 'void *pointer', any pointer will be properly converted, 
but this defeats my purpose of checking to make sure that the second
argument is really a function pointer.

	I can think of many times when I have passed pointers to functions 
that return various different types, yet I see no way of doing this when
using prototypes.  

		Steve Kaufer
		steve@harvard.HARVARD.EDU
		{seismo,ihnp4,allegra,ut-sally}!harvard!steve