A strange problem with Visual Studio (error C1075 and C2601)

CodeGuru content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

Using Visual Studio 2013 C++, I got compilation errors that I couldn’t explain.
 
The compilation errors were:
 

[*]*main.cpp(325): error C2601: ‘FLAG’ : local function definitions are illegal
 
[*]main.cpp(323): this line contains a ‘{‘ which has not yet been matched
 
[*]main.cpp(326): fatal error C1075: end of file found before the left brace ‘{‘ at ‘main.cpp(323)’ was matched*

 
But there was nothing wrong with my code. I counted all brackets and the number matched. There weren’t any function inside another function.

 

I solved it by removing all "//" comments from the source code. It seems that the reason for that is bad line formatting which causes the compiler to miss a line break, so the line after a comment is treated as a comment as well.

 
For example:

// This is a commentThis_is_a_line;

 
is treated as:
 

// This is a commentThis_is_a_line;

 

There are many posts of the net about similar problems and some even suggested that they could be caused by a memory (RAM) fault on the machine, so before you replace your RAM, just remove the comments and see…

— Michael Haephrati