What does "error: invalid function declaration" mean?

Question

With GCC 4.1.2, I get the error tmp.cpp:8: error: invalid function declaration for the following code

namespace edit {
  class A {
  public:
    void foo( );
  };
}

void edit:A::foo( ) {
}

Answer 1

The problem was easy to fix:

void edit:A::foo( ) {
         ^
    missing ':'

should be:

void edit::A::foo( ) {

Answer 2

Syntax error, as that post said. Sometimes syntax errors leads to wrong error messages because of the parsing strategy, which is annoying.