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.
The first constructor in the header should not end with a semicolon. #include
Let’s fix this up:
//polygone.h
# if !defined(__POLYGONE_H__)
# define __POLYGONE_H__
#include
#include
class Polygone {
public:
// declarations have to end with a semicolon, definitions do not
Polygone(){} // why would we needs this?
Polygone(const std::string& fichier);
};
# endif
and
//polygone.cc
// no need to include things twice
#include “polygone.h”
#include
Polygone::Polygone(const std::string& nom)
{
std::ifstream fichier (nom, ios::in);
if (fichier.is_open())
{
// keep the scope as tiny as possible
std::string line;
// getline returns the stream and streams convert to booleans
while ( std::getline(fichier, line) )
{
std::cout << line << std::endl;
}
}
else
{
std::cerr << "Erreur a l'ouverture du fichier" << std::endl;
}
}