Why can't templates be within extern “C” blocks?

Question

This is a follow-up question to an answer to Is it possible to typedef a pointer-to-extern-“C”-function type within a template?

This code fails to compile w

Answer 1

Because template function names need to be decorated with additional information, and extern "C" turns decoration off. The purpose of extern "C" is to be able to declare functions that can be called with C linkage, which is something that will never work with a template function obviously.