Question

I am porting some C++ code to GCC, and apperantly it isn’t happy with C++ style casting when sapces are involved, as in unsigned int(-1), long long(ShortVar) etc… It gives an error: expected primary-expression before 'long'.

Is there any way to make peace with GCC without going over each one of those and rewrite in c-style?

Answer 1

GCC is correctly crying — unsigned int(-1) is a notation that is not conformant with the C++03 standard (5.4.2):

An explicit type conversion can be expressed using functional notation (5.2.3), a type conversion operator (dynamic_cast, static_cast, reinterpret_cast, const_cast), or the cast notation:

cast-expression:
   unary-expression
   ( type-id ) cast-expression

Ergo, you can either correct the cast with the parenthesis, follow the excellent suggestions proposed by GMan 🙂 — and I’d truly recommend the latter.

Edit: the functional notation requires a simple-type-specifier:

5.2.3 – A simple-type-specifier (7.1.5) followed by a parenthesized expression-list constructs a value of the specified type given the expression list.

Simple type specifiers do not include the composite ones (the ones with spaces).