Question

I got strange error from g++. The procedure for which the error prompts compiles itself excellent within other project, but here somehow not. Here is what g++ complains about:

g++ -c -Wall -pedantic clear_screen.cpp -lcurses -o .clear.o
clear_screen.cpp:6:6: error: expected initializer before ‘->’ token
make: *** [.clear.o] Error 1

The corresponding makefile part looks like:

CC=g++
CFLAGS=-c -Wall -pedantic
COMP=$(CC) $(CFLAGS)
.clear.o : clear_screen.cpp
    $(COMP) clear_screen.cpp -lcurses -o $@

And the file in question consists of the following lines:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <term.h>

void clear_screen() {
  if ( !cur_term ) { // line 6 is here
    int result;
    setupterm( NULL, STDOUT_FILENO, &result );
    if (result <= 0) return;
  }
  putp( tigetstr( "clear" ) );
}

Where am I wrong?

Answer 1

clear_screen is defined in term.h as cur_term->type.Strings[5] (at least on my system), hence the problem with ->. See g++ -E output to see what preprocessor does. So essentially you need to use a name different from clear_screen to avoid conflict.