Difference between creating object with () or without

Question

i just run into the problem

error: request for member ‘show’ in ‘myWindow’, which is of non-class type ‘MainGUIWindow()’

when trying to compile a simple qt-application:

#include <QApplication>
#include "gui/MainGUIWindow.h"


int main( int argc, char** argv )
{
  QApplication app( argc, argv );


  MainGUIWindow myWindow();
  myWindow.show();


  return app.exec();
}

I solved this by replacing

MainGUIWindow myWindow(); 

by

MainGUIWindow myWindow;

but I don't understand the difference. My question: What is the difference?

Regards, Dirk

Answer 1

The other answers correctly state that the parentheses version is actually a function declaration. To understand it intuitively, suppose you wrote MainGUIWindow f(); Looks more like a function, doesn't it? :) The more interesting question is what is the difference between

MainGUIWindow* p = new MainGUIWindow;

and

MainGUIWindow* p = new MainGUIWindow();

The version with parentheses is called value-initialization, whereas the version without is called default-initialization. For non-POD classes there is no difference between the two. For POD-structs, however, value-initialization involves setting all members to 0,

my2c

Addition: In general, if some syntactic construct can be interpreted both as a declaration and something else, the compiler always resolves the ambiguity in favor of the declaration.