Question

As I understood pointers to non-static methods, they’re no more useful than for providing an alias mechanism for a certain method. For example, having an object with three methods

 class Provider
 {
 public:
 int A(int in);
 int B(int in);
 int C(int in);
 }

and a consumer that requires a pointer to a provider method (be it A, B or C). Having a controller that gives a pointer to one of the 3 methods to the so-called consumer, we can write something in the consumer code that uses a Provider instance and the pointer to either A, B or C, depending on what the controller sent.

If this is all that a pointer to a non-static method in C++ can do, is there still a way of providing a more “intelligent” pointer to an object’s method, without sending the object along with that method pointer to a consumer? In the affirmative case, what’s the idiom/mechanism called (even a way to simulate this qualifies as an answer I’m interested in).

Answer 1

Your concept of member functions pointers is correct in general.

Member functions pointers are actually very useful with conjunctions to such helpers, as std::bind, or std::function. Raw member function pointers are usually ugly.

As for your example,

Your consumer can accept std::function<return_type(args)> and you can pass binding of object and its member function to such consumer.

such structs as std::bind also allows realization of such concepts as partial specialization and currying.