Suspicious semicolon?

[N_K]

Hello all.

I decided to base my "game" on the Advanced Ogre Framework (many thanks to Spacegaier and jacmoe for making it, it's an enormous help). It compiles fine, however, I got a few warnings, and I wanted to eliminate them. I managed to do it, apart from a few "Suspicious semicolon" warnings in DotSceneLoader.cpp. The code looks like this:

Code: Select all

if(pElement)
        ;

Indeed a semicolon, and indeed suspicious. I'm not that experienced with C++, so, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what is this supposed to be. If it's an empty 'if' statement, isn't it supposed to be something like this:

Code: Select all

if(pElement)
{     

}

?

Could someone shed some light on this? Thank you in advance. And sorry for being a total noob...

[PhilipLB]

Hi,

the compiler warns you here not to run into traps like this:

Code: Select all

if (foo);
  bar();

bar(); gets always executed here because of the semicolon.

[Zonder]

This is one reason I always insist on using braces with if statements

[N_K]

So it's indeed an empty 'if' statement. Thank you all for your help.

[Valentin Perrelle]

The C++ Grammar allow a statement to be an empty expression. So this is how is considered a semi-colon alone. Since the if statement only applies to the following statement, it thus applies to the empty statement in your code.