Receiving "expected expression before" Error When Using A Struct

Posted by Zach Dziura on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Zach Dziura
Published on 2012-10-22T20:54:18Z Indexed on 2012/10/22 23:00 UTC
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I'm in the process of creating a simple 2D game engine in C with a group of friends at school. I'd like to write this engine in an Object-Oriented way, using structs as classes, function pointers as methods, etc. To emulate standard OOP syntax, I created a create() function which allocates space in memory for the object. I'm in the process of testing it out, and I'm receiving an error. Here is my code for two files that I'm using to test:

test.c:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
        typedef struct
        {
                int i;
        } Class;

        Class *test = (Class*) create(Class);
        test->i = 1;

        printf("The value of \"test\" is: %i\n", test->i);

        return 0;
}

utils.c:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include "utils.h"

void* create(const void* class)
{
        void *obj = (void*) malloc(sizeof(class));
        if (obj == 0)
        {
                printf("Error allocating memory.\n");
                return (int*) -1;
        }
        else {
                return obj;
        }
}

void destroy(void* object)
{
        free(object);
}

The utils.h file simply holds prototypes for the create() and destroy() functions.

When I execute gcc test.c utils.c -o test, I'm receiving this error message:

test.c: In function 'main':
test.c:10:32: error: expected expression before 'Class'

I know it has something to do with my typedef at the beginning, and how I'm probably not using proper syntax. But I have no idea what that proper syntax is. Can anyone help?

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