error on private inheritance and function overloading

Question

I have a problem which I narrowed down to the following code:

class A
{
};

class B : private A
{
};

void f(A*)
{
}

void f(void*)
{
}

int main()
{
  B b;
  f(&b);
}

Which gives the following error with gcc 4.7:

error: ‘A’ is an inaccessible base of ‘B’

I know that A is inaccessible but I would have liked the compiler to call f(void*). Is this behavior normal or am I doing something wrong? Or maybe it's a compiler bug?

Answer 1

Overloading is resolved before access checking. So the compiler chooses f(A*) as the appropriate overload, then determines that &b can't be converted to A* and gives the error message.