Hi Jaakko,
I think the extended lifetime rule for temporaries would make it work ok, but the mere definition of the "forward" function above will at least trigger warnings about returning a reference to a temporary.
(I'm assuming you meant "const x(*f)()" as the parameter of the forward function)
Right. Should have verified it myself rather than just speculating :-( However, this problem seems to be easily remedied with assigning to an intermediate variable. The following compiles w/o warnings, and runs correctly, on mingw 3.4.2, and VC7.1/8.0 (warning level 4): #include <iostream> using namespace std; const int f() { return 0; } const int& ff() { const int& result = f(); return result; } int main() { const int& r = ff(); cout << r << endl; return 0; } I am still not sure though, if the lifetime is extended far enough for this case, or does this just work correctly by accident... (have to take a closer look into the Standard) Regards, Arkadiy