Function typedefs have any use?

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

"Kevin P. Fleming" <kpfleming@starnetworks.us> writes:

| Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| 
| > I guess "pointless" is in the eye of beholder.  I've used that ability
| > quite a lot in some projects, where a large number of functions
| > sharing the same prototype has to be declared.
| 
| But you still had to repeat the prototypes when defining the

yes.  And I did not find it terribly annoying, compared to what I
would have to come up with.

| functions, so it did not provide as much benefit as it could... the
| declarations automatically change when you modify the typedef, but the
| function definitions don't.
| 
| > Care to make a concrete proposal?  There is no point in complaining
| > if you can't improve over the situation...
| 
| Sure, how would I go about doing that? Obviously it would be a GCC
| extension only, but I think it could be useful.
| 
| Something as simple as:
| 
| typedef char *f_t(char, char, void *);
| 
| f_t f;
| 
| f(p1, p2, p3)

But, now this looks like an old-style function definition, except that
the type of the parameters are not provided -- so you would have to
make sure that you do not introduce a parsing ambiguity!

If you believe you have a solution that actually works, then you have
the choice between:

  (1) writing a formal proposal and contact the ISO C commitee;
  (2) writing a formal proposal and convince the GNU C maintainers
      that your proposal worths adding to GNU C, and work out the
      details with them.


-- Gaby