CCS/MSP430F6636: CCS build error with missing Semicolon

This is harder than you think.

Harbison and steele:
"In C source programs the blank (space), end-of-line, vertical tab, form feed, and horizontal tab (if present) are known collectively as whitespace characters...These characters are ignored except insofar as they are used to separate tokens"

Only preprocessor lines use the linefeed as a termination character. This is legal C:
volatile
int
a,
b,
c
;

What is the semicolon used for? Do you actually mean source file?

Stephen

If you mean me, the semicolon terminates the statement that would usually be written:
volatile int a,b,c;

I was just being pathological. But compiler writers have to consider pathological cases.

I think it is impossible to have a c file without a semicolon. 8^)

They can easily show up in header files (.h) or program files (.c). I am not sure what you mean by "source". I was quoting Harbison and Steele - so it has to be correct. 8^)

You have stumbled on a tricky one. If the compiler still accepts old-style C function definitions, it can go really far down a rabbit hole.

I agree with you like you know a header file is a file containing C declarations and macro definitions files don't have any source code so compiler should know if is header the missing semicolon mean error. Then go to the line just like Visual Studio do i need see extra 100 errors?

I know you can say you always need semicolon but you can move some code paste and will missing 8^)

I feel your pain, but generating good error messages is very difficult. I know, because I wrote a parser and used a C expression grammar. Even with this small subset of a language I found it difficult to produce meaningful errors in some cases.

Note that the compilers with the better messages like Visual Studio and Clang have the most resources. I understand that gcc is rather poor in this regard, also. Usually the trick is to just focus on the first error, fix that and re-try.

Keith Barkley said:

I think it is impossible to have a c file without a semicolon. 8^)

For amusement value, consider "int main() { }", which is strictly conforming.

I knew that, hence the smiley.
A .h file with only #defines would not have semicolons, either.

Ah, but don't you see, I knew you knew that!