visual c++ - Why is this program erroneously rejected by three C++ compilers?

I am having some difficulty compiling a C++ program that I've written.

This program is very simple and, to the best of my knowledge, conforms to all the rules set forth in the C++ Standard. I've read over the entirety of ISO/IEC 14882:2003 twice to be sure.

The program is as follows:

Here is the output I received when trying to compile this program with Visual C++ 2010:

c:\dev>cl /nologo helloworld.png
cl : Command line warning D9024 : unrecognized source file type 'helloworld.png', object file assumed
helloworld.png : fatal error LNK1107: invalid or corrupt file: cannot read at 0x5172

Dismayed, I tried g++ 4.5.2, but it was equally unhelpful:

c:\dev>g++ helloworld.png
helloworld.png: file not recognized: File format not recognized
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

I figured that Clang (version 3.0 trunk 127530) must work, since it is so highly praised for its standards conformance. Unfortunately, it didn't even give me one of its pretty, highlighted error messages:

c:\dev>clang++ helloworld.png
helloworld.png: file not recognized: File format not recognized
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

clang++: error: linker (via gcc) command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

To be honest, I don't really know what any of these error message mean.

Many other C++ programs have source files with a .cpp extension, so I thought perhaps I needed to rename my file. I changed its name to helloworld.cpp, but that didn't help. I think there is a very serious bug in Clang because when I tried using it to compile the renamed program, it flipped out, printed "84 warnings and 20 errors generated." and made my computer beep a lot!

What have I done wrong here? Have I missed some critical part of the C++ Standard? Or are all three compilers really just so broken that they can't compile this simple program?

Answer

In the standard, §2.1/1 specifies:

Physical source file characters are mapped, in an implementation-defined manner, to the basic source character set (introducing new-line characters for end-of-line indicators) if necessary.

Your compiler doesn't support that format (aka cannot map it to the basic source character set), so it cannot move into further processing stages, hence the error. It is entirely possible that your compiler support a mapping from image to basic source character set, but is not required to.

Since this mapping is implementation-defined, you'll need to look at your implementations documentation to see the file formats it supports. Typically, every major compiler vendor supports (canonically defined) text files: any file produced by a text editor, typically a series of characters.

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Note that the C++ standard is based off the C standard (§1.1/2), and the C(99) standard says, in §1.2:

This International Standard does not specify
— the mechanism by which C programs are transformed for use by a data-processing
system;
— the mechanism by which C programs are invoked for use by a data-processing
system;
— the mechanism by which input data are transformed for use by a C program;

So, again, the treatment of source files is something you need to find in your compilers documentation.