Why is this program erroneously rejected by three C compilers

Question

I am having some difficulty compiling a C   program that I ve written   This program is very simple and  to the best of my knowledge  conforms to all the rules set forth in the C   Standard   I ve read over the entirety of ISO IEC 14882 2003 twice to be sure   The program is as follows     Here is the output I received when trying to compile this program with Visual C   2010   c  dev gt cl  nologo helloworld png cl   Command line warning D9024   unrecognized source file type  helloworld png   object file assumed helloworld png   fatal error LNK1107  invalid or corrupt file  cannot read at 0x5172   Dismayed  I tried g   4 5 2  but it was equally unhelpful   c  dev gt g   helloworld png helloworld png  file not recognized  File format not recognized collect2  ld returned 1 exit status   I figured that Clang  version 3 0 trunk 127530  must work  since it is so highly praised for its standards conformance   Unfortunately  it didn t even give me one of its pretty  highlighted error messages   c  dev gt clang   helloworld png helloworld png  file not recognized  File format not recognized collect2  ld returned 1 exit status clang    error  linker  via gcc  command failed with exit code 1  use -v to see invocation    To be honest  I don t really know what any of these error message mean   Many other C   programs have source files with a  cpp extension  so I thought perhaps I needed to rename my file   I changed its name to helloworld cpp  but that didn t help   I think there is a very serious bug in Clang because when I tried using it to compile the renamed program  it flipped out  printed  84 warnings and 20 errors generated   and made my computer beep a lot   What have I done wrong here   Have I missed some critical part of the C   Standard   Or are all three compilers really just so broken that they can t compile this simple program

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Your  lt  and   gt     and       and    don t seem to match very well  Try drawing them better

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The problem lies with the syntax definition  try using ruler and compasses for a more classical description   Cheers

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Originally from Overv   reddit

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Run the compiler through OCR  It might solve the compatibility issue

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I ve found it helps to not write my code on my monitor s glass with a magic marker  even though it looks nice when its really black  The screen fills up too fast and then the people who give me a clean monitor call me names each week   A couple of my employees  I m a manager  are chipping in to buy me one of those red pad computers with the knobs  They said that I won t need markers and I can clean the screen myself when it s full but I have to be careful shaking it  I supposed it s delicate that way   That s why I hire the smart people

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Am I the only one who can t recognize the character between  return  and the semicolon  That could be it

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Try switching input interface  C   expects a keyboard to be plugged in to your computer  not a scanner  There may be peripherals conflict issues here  I didn t check in ISO Standard if keyboard input interface is mandatory  but that is true for all compilers I ever used  But maybe scanner input is now available in C99  and in this case your program should indeed work  If not you ll have to wait the next standard release and upgrade of compilers

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Unfortunately  you have selected three compilers that all support multiple languages  not just C    They all have to guess at the programming language you used  As you probably already know  the PNG format is suitable for all programming languages  not just C      Usually the compiler can figure out the language itself  For instance  if the PNG is obviously drawn with crayons  the compiler will know it contains Visual Basic  If it looks like it s drawn with a mechanical pencil  it s easy to recognize the engineer at work  writing FORTRAN code   This second step doesn t help the compiler either  in this case  C and C   just look too similar  down to the  include  Therefore  you must help the compiler decide what language it really is  Now  you could use non-standard means  For instance  the Visual Studio compiler accepts the  TC and  TP command-line arguments  or you could use the  Compile as  C    option in the project file  GCC and CLang have their own mechanisms  which I don t know    Therefore  I d recommend using the standard method instead to tell your compiler that the code following is in C    As you ve discovered by now  C   compilers are very picky about what they accept  Therefore the standard way to identify C   is by the intimidation programmers add to their C   code  For instance  the following line will clarify to your compiler that what follows is C    and he d better compile it without complaints        To the compiler  I know where you are installed  No funny games  capice

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Is your compiler set in expert mode   If yes  it shouldn t compile  Modern compilers are tired of  Hello World

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The first problem is  that you are trying to return an incorrect value at the end of the main function  C   standard dictates that the return type of main   is int  but instead you are trying to return the empty set   The other problem is - at least with g   - that the compiler deduces the language used from the file suffix  From g   1       For any given input file  the file   name suffix determines what kind of   compilation is done       file cc file cp file cxx file cpp file CPP file c   file C      C    source code which must be preprocessed  Note that in  cxx  the   last two letters must both be literally x  Likewise   C refers to a   literal capital C    Fixing these should leave you with a fully working Hello World application  as can be seen from the demo here

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I did convert your program from PNG to ASCII  but it does not compile yet   For your information  I did try with line width 100 and 250 characters but both yield in comparable results                                                                                                                 -   --       -            --     -                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            -  -                                              --          -  -       - -   - -   -      -   -          -      -                                                                          -                      -                                      -                                                                                                                                                                                                                          -  -   -   - -       -  -  -   -   -   -         - -        -          -                                                                                                                           -     -                                                                                    -                                                                                                    -

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OCR Says   N lml  e  lt loJ  e      lnt Mk  n   ln   rSC Lhc yh   h S   l  s l   co    lt     H llo uo  d       lt  lt  s l    ena    TP  rn          Which is pretty damn good  to be fair

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In the standard    2 1 1 specifies      Physical source file characters are mapped  in an implementation-defined manner  to the basic source character set  introducing new-line characters for end-of-line indicators  if necessary    Your compiler doesn t support that format  aka cannot map it to the basic source character set   so it cannot move into further processing stages  hence the error  It is entirely possible that your compiler support a mapping from image to basic source character set  but is not required to    Since this mapping is implementation-defined  you ll need to look at your implementations documentation to see the file formats it supports  Typically  every major compiler vendor supports  canonically defined  text files  any file produced by a text editor  typically a series of characters      Note that the C   standard is based off the C standard    1 1 2   and the C 99  standard says  in   1 2      This International Standard does not specify       the mechanism by which C programs are transformed for use by a data-processing   system        the mechanism by which C programs are invoked for use by a data-processing   system        the mechanism by which input data are transformed for use by a C program    So  again  the treatment of source files is something you need to find in your compilers documentation

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Did you handwrite the program and then scan it into the computer   That is what is implied by  helloworld png    If that is the case  you need to be aware that the C   standard  even in its newest edition  does not require the presence of optical character recognition  and unfortunately it is not included as an optional feature in any current compiler   You may want to consider transposing the graphics to a textual format   Any plain-text editor may be used  the use of a word processor  while capable of generating a pretty printout  will most likely result in the same error that you get while trying to scan   If you are truly adventurous  you may attempt to write your code into a word processor   Print it  preferably using a font like OCR-A   Then  take your printout and scan it back in   The scan can then be run through a third-party OCR package to generate a text form   The text form may then be compiled using one of many standard compilers   Beware  however  of the great cost of paper that this will incur during the debugging phase

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You forgot the pre-processor   Try this   pngtopnm helloworld png   ocrad   g   -x  c    -

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Your font sucks  how should a parser ever be able to read that  Take a calligraphy course

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You forgot to use Comic Sans as a font  that s why its erroring

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add    using namespace std    right after include  P D

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I can t see a new-line after that last brace   As you know   If a source file that is not empty does not end in a new-line character      the behavior is undefined

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You could try the following python script  Note that you need to install PIL and pytesser   from pytesser import   image   Image open  helloworld png      Open image object using PIL print image to string image        Run tesseract exe on image   To use it  do   python script py  gt  helloworld cpp  g   helloworld cpp

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helloworld png  file not recognized  File format not recognized   Obviously  you should format your hard drive     Really  these errors aren t that hard to read

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File format not recognized You need to properly format your file  That means using the right colors and fonts for your code  See the specific documentations for each compiler as these colors vary between compiler

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You re trying to compile an image   Type out what you ve hand written into a document called main cpp  run that file through your compiler  then run the output file

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This program is valid -- I can find no errors   My guess is you have a virus on your machine   It would be best if you reformat your drive  and reinstall the operating system   Let us know how that works out  or if you need help with the reinstall   I hate viruses

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Try this way

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Try this one

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Your compilers are expecting ASCII  but that program is obviously written using EBCDIC

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You could try different colors for brackets  maybe some green or red would help   I think your compiler can t rcognize black ink  P

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Seems that your compiler doesn t support files in such hmm    encoding  Try to convert it to ASCII

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Draw the include below to make it compile    include  lt ChuckNorris gt    I hear he can compile syntax errors

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You need to specify the precision of your output preceded by a colon immediately before the final closing brace  Since the output is not numeric  the precision is zero  so you need this-   0

[c++] Why is this program erroneously rejected by three C++ compilers?

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