C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

6.4.1. Overloading and Scope

Warning

Ordinarily, it is a bad idea to declare a function locally. However, to explain how scope interacts with overloading, we will violate this practice and use local function declarations.

Programmers new to C++ are often confused about the interaction between scope and overloading. However, overloading has no special properties with respect to scope: As usual, if we declare a name in an inner scope, that name hides uses of that name declared in an outer scope. Names do not overload across scopes:

string read(); ...