Re: can a class member function be used as a callback function?

From:
"James Kanze" <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
29 Mar 2007 05:45:06 -0700
Message-ID:
<1175172305.953176.36200@r56g2000hsd.googlegroups.com>
On Mar 28, 3:29 am, JDT <jdt_yo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Can we pass a member function in a class as a callback function?


You can pass whatever the interface requires, and nothing else.
I've even seen some interfaces (in a Windows manager for Sun)
which used pointers to member function for the callbacks. It's
rather exceptional, however. Typically, two cases occur:

 -- The interface was designed with C++ in mind. In that case,
    most of the time, you pass pointers to functional objects as
    the callback. Traditionally, those objects must derive from
    a common base class, and override a specific function in
    that class, but some newer interfaces use more or less fancy
    template tricks to allow you to pass pretty much anything
    which will support a function call operator.

 -- The interface is designed for C or C/C++. In that case,
    you'll almost certainly have to pass the address of an
    `extern "C"' function: static members don't cut it, nor do
    normal global functions in C++. Hopefully, you'll also get
    the chance to pass a void* with the address of "user data";
    your user data will be a functional object, as above, which
    gets called in the function whose address you pass.

Someone instucted me that I can only use a static functon or a global
function as a callback.


To date, I've never seen an interface where a static member
function could be used (except perhaps some of those using fancy
templates). See above: it very much depends on the interface,
and it's possible for an interface to use just about anything.
What you do have to do is conform to the interface: if it
expects a pointer to a member function of class X, you have to
pass it a pointer to a (non-static) member fucntion of class X.
If it has a C compatible interface, you must pass it a function
declared `extern "C"'. And if it expects a pointer to a class
CallBack, you have to derive from CallBack, and pass it a
pointer to an object of the derived type.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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