On 21 January 2013 15:31, Jonathan Wakely wrote: > On 21 January 2013 15:17, Tim Prince wrote: >> On 1/20/2013 10:47 PM, horseriver wrote: >>> >>> >>> what is the use of extern c within a declaration? >>> >>> >>> >> extern "C" basically shuts off C++ symbol mangling (and facilities which >> depend on it), so as to facilitate linking with C and with languages such as >> Fortran which support C interoperability. > > And says to use C calling conventions, because there's no guarantee > C++ uses the same ones (though with GCC it does.) > >> The definition seems rather >> loose; we frequently see reference operators used even though their >> compatibility with C is doubtful. > > That's perfectly well-defined. A C program would be able to link to > such a function and e.g. take its address. It just won't be able to > call it (correctly) because it can't pass it a reference. Hmm, actually it couldn't even declare it correctly in the C code, so couldn't refer to it at all. But that doesn't mean you can't have extern "C" functions with reference parameters, it just means they're not very useful!
