What? Checkout the signature for the posix signal function. Notice the function pointer?

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/signal.2.html

"Signals have been around since the 1970s Bell Labs Unix and have been more recently specified in the POSIX standard." --wikipedia

Basically, they're a software interrupt handler. Not too different from assembly. I don't see why that would be innovative at all?

In fact, early C++ just compiled to C. You can write structs with function pointers and vtables all in C if you wanted. People have been doing that since the 80s.

Forget the Posix/Win32 platforms, function pointers can be easily found in the Standard C library itself. I believe there are atleast 2 functions taking function pointers as parameters:

1.>'qsort' function takes a function pointer to decide how to compare your data in order to sort it, presumably using quick sort.

2.>'signal' function has a Posix origin, but it did manage to make it into the C standard. It takes a function pointer to decide which function to call on getting a particular signal.

I was using C function pointers routinely in 1991, way before I ever touched Windows. It was a straightforward thing to do after using them in assembly language throughout the 80s.