expected constructor, destructor, or type conversion before ‘(’ token

Question

Compiling polygone.h and polygone.cc gives error:

polygone.cc:5:19: error: expected constructor, destructor, or type conversion bef         


        

Answer 1

This is not only a 'newbie' scenario. I just ran across this compiler message (GCC 5.4) when refactoring a class to remove some constructor parameters. I forgot to update both the declaration and definition, and the compiler spit out this unintuitive error.

The bottom line seems to be this: If the compiler can't match the definition's signature to the declaration's signature it thinks the definition is not a constructor and then doesn't know how to parse the code and displays this error. Which is also what happened for the OP: std::string is not the same type as string so the declaration's signature differed from the definition's and this message was spit out.

As a side note, it would be nice if the compiler looked for almost-matching constructor signatures and upon finding one suggested that the parameters didn't match rather than giving this message.