Question

I am using Visual Studio 2010 Express and I am getting the following errors for the file test.h, which when compiled outputs:

test.h(4): error C2061: syntax error : identifier 'test'
test.h(4): error C2059: syntax error : ';'
test.h(4): error C2449: found '{' at file scope (missing function header?)
test.h(18): error C2059: syntax error : '}'

The file test.h is described as follows:

#ifndef TEST_H
#define TEST_H

class test {
    int a; 
    int b; 
public:        
    test(int a, int b) { 
        this->a = a;
        this->b = b;
    }

    int add() { 
        return 0;
    }
};

#endif

The other file in the VS2010 project is test.c which is:

#include "test.h"

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    return 0;
}

I have a tried of multitude of ways to resolve this problem. Even if I define test.h as follows:

class test{

};

I still receive the same set of errors.

I saw a similar problem
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7798876/strange-errors-when-using-byte-pbyte-instead-of-char-char-in-vs2k10-wdk-envi
with no response.

I will be really grateful if someone could please point out how to resolve these errors.

Thanks,

Answer 1

The Microsoft compiler supports both C and C++ languages, but they are not the same and need to be treated differently (for example class is no keyword in C and thus ultimately causes the error your get). So it has to somehow “know” what kind of language (C or C++) it is dealing with when compiling a source file (and thus also processing the includes).

It thinks you are trying to compile a C language file (because it has the file extension .c), while you are actually using the C++ language. Rename your file to have one of the file extensions the Microsoft C/C++ compiler recognizes as C++: .cpp, .cxx or .cc.

Alternatively, if you cannot rename the file, you can also use the /Tp command line option of cl.exe to force it to treat the file as a C++ file (for completeness /Tc would force the C language).