I'm embarrassed that I spent so long on this issue, to the point that I thought it was worth writing this issue in the hope that it might save someone the same trouble. If this is inappropriate (or already address), my apologies.

I normally work in the C++ world for simple embedded programming, mostly just with a subset of the language features. I love the sugar. The old "C" way of doing things has always bugged me. I'm thinking of basic features like overloading function.

Now I'm working on a project that has a lot of legacy C that's too much work to convert to C++.

In implementing a simple function, without thinking, I used a reference (`void foo(int&i);`) to pass a variable to a function (not a plain pointer). The astute among you will remember that passing by reference is a C++ feature that simply does not exist in C.

Error message:
> test.c:1:13: error: expected ‘;’, ‘,’ or ‘)’ before ‘&’ token

It took me most of a day to realize I was trying to use a feature that simply doesn't exist in C (lots of other #define macros that contributed to my confusion). It feels like this error message should be easy enough to improve.

With how often C and C++ get conflated, it seems prudent to me to ensure that accidentally using C++ features in a C compiler would generate warnings or errors that point towards these possible mistake explicitly.