Storing a series of function calls

So I'm trying to write some sort of system to store a series of function calls.

The goal is sort of unclear, but I was thinking maybe I could have a series of member function calls stored in an object which would effect the object, and could add or remove calls from this list at runtime.

I just spent a little while trying to write a generic "function call" object that will store a function pointer of variable argument length that I can call.

And then I was figuring I could put them into a vector to be able to call them at runtime.

So I started to wonder if this was even worth doing, and I'm also wondering if there's already a data structure in the STL that might be more suited for what I'm trying to do.

Thanks for any advice, and if you need to me clarify anything let me know

There certainly may be ways to do this, e.g., by storing function pointers or function objects, but why do you want to do this?

I didn't want to get too specific to what I'm working on, but it's some game system architecture.

The initial reason I wanted to work on this was the thought of dynamically storing a series of different effect/behavior functions onto particles in a particle system.

So I figured that maybe it could be a clean way to do that, for example if one object only needs to call 2 functions each time it updates, but another needs to call 20.

And I'm just getting into C++/OOP so it is also kind of an educational experience.

I'm sure it might be a bit faster to just hard code this stuff but I wanted to try out some component based ideas for it.

And I was wondering if anybody had ever tried/considered this, or if maybe using a map or something would be loads faster

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Originally Posted by inequity

The initial reason I wanted to work on this was the thought of dynamically storing a series of different effect/behavior functions onto particles in a particle system.

So I figured that maybe it could be a clean way to do that, for example if one object only needs to call 2 functions each time it updates, but another needs to call 20.

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I am just guessing, of course, but a hierarchy of effect/behaviour classes might work. A virtual member function, e.g., an overload of operator() or one named apply, could then be passed these objects to apply the effect/behaviour to. If you want to store these, or (smart) pointers to these, in a container, it certainly could be done.