Whandall:
I've never seen or used the version without the dereferencing star, thanks for the info.Any idea which C++ version started this behaviour?
It's been that way in C since just about forever, and probably the same in C++, because there's only one thing it could possibly mean (call the function pointed to by the function pointer). It's the same reason you don't need to use & to get the address of a function--a function name without parentheses already decays to a pointer to the function.