Question

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In C++ classes, why the semi-colon after the closing brace

This is something I have wondered about for quite some time, why do you have to put a semicolon after the closing bracket of a class, struct or enum in c++?

Worse (or the actual question), why does compilers emit errors about it when they could simply issue a warning?

Is it really important to put that semicolon there and if, why?

Answer 1

It’s a leftover from C. You can declare variables after cladd/struct/enum declaration. the code:

class A{};
A a;

Is identical to:

class A{} a;

The compiler needs the ; to know you don’t want to declare variables after the class declaration.