Why doesn't private inheritance resolve ambiguity for static functions ? (tested in MSVC)

Question

I'm wondering why a call to a static function is ambiguous, even when one of the two is obviously impossible to call as it is private. I was hoping I could use private / protected inheritance to help the compiler solve the ambiguity.

Is it specific to MSVC or is it somehow specified in the standard ?

struct A
{
    static int num() { return 0; }
};

struct B
{
    static int num() { return 1; }
};

struct C : public A, private B
{};

int main()
{
     C::num(); // Ambiguous access of num
}

The background is that I was trying a way of reusing an overloading behavior (the one in A) in many derived classes (C,D,E,F,G) by inheriting it, to adhere somehow to a rule of Don't Repeat Yourself.

Answer 1

Yes it is specified in the C++ Standard, section §3.4 [basic.lookup]

The access rules (Clause 11) are considered only once name lookup and function overload resolution (if applicable) have succeeded

Name lookup doesn't care about accessibility : it finds both A::num and B::num, so there is an ambiguity for the compiler.

You can explicitly call A::num with :

C::A::num();

If you explicitly try to call B::num, then your compiler will indeed emit an access error :

C::B::num(); // Error

You can also explicitly bring the base name into scope within the derived class, which will fix the ambiguity :

struct C : public A, private B
{
    using A::num;    
};