Error returning 1 when comparing strings

Question

Can anyone tell me why Visual Studio is giving me an error when I try to return 1 by using my define ERROR macro? VS says its expecting a bracket :/

#define ERROR "A generic error has occured";

const char *RetAdapters(int *adapters) {

    if(...) {} 

    else
        return ERROR;
} 


int main()
{
    const char *ret = RetAdapters(&input);

    if (strcmp(*ret, ERROR) == 0) {
        return 1;
    }

    return 0;

}

Answer 1

The definition of ERROR contains a trailing ; which causes a syntax error when ERROR gets expanded in if (strcmp(*ret, ERROR) == 0) {

Remove the ; from the macro definition and also remove the indirection *:

#define ERROR "A generic error has occurred"

const char *RetAdapters(int *adapters) {
    if (...) {
        ... 
    } else {
        return ERROR;
    }
} 

int main() {
    const char *ret = RetAdapters(&input);

    if (strcmp(ret, ERROR) == 0) {
        return 1;
    }
    return 0;
}

Note however that this programming style is not recommended:

• ERROR could be defined as a global variable:

  const char ERROR[] = "A generic error has occurred";
  

• RetAdapters() could return a error status, different from 0 and return 0 for success. This is how most system calls report success and failure on unix systems, and this is how main() is supposed to report successful operation to the system.