What does the name of a function denote?

[denkspuren]

I think I get your point.

Maybe I was overcomplicating things, maybe its as simple as this: A function name is just the name of a function. If used in a call context like in funcName(...) it refers to a function call, if used as ::funcName it refers to a callable function reference. I tried to explain this to myself here:

Is funcName(...) syntactic sugar for (::funcName).invoke(...)?

So it’s very much like methods and method references in Java, but these are platform specific details. I would say that, conceptually, funcName is a name of a function factory, very much like ClassName is a name of a class type. The name as such is a compile time thing. If funcName is used syntactically in a call context such as funcName(...), the runtime experiences no trace of an entity representing that function (and no hook to that entity) nor a trace to a method such as invoke being involv…