Odd message from CC with zero-length char definitions

CC version 5.82

I had a fat fingered moment and defined a char as having zero elements (instead of 9, 8+term).

The definition was:

   char blahwhatever[0] = "";

Norcroft replied with:

Line  Type           Description
 707  Error          expected ';' or ',' - inserted ';' before '"$"'
 707  Warning        no side effect in void context: <string constant>

I can’t help but think that the error message is a bit of gibberish, and something to the effect of “char arrays cannot be empty, dumbass” might be more appropriate than… whatever '"$"' is supposed to be.

whatever ‘“$”’ is supposed to be

I’m guessing that it’s supposed to represent an anonymous string.

For what it’s worth, when you make the same mistake in clang it doesn’t generate any warning at all. But if you specify some string content:

test.c:3:26: warning: initializer-string for char array is too long [-Wexcess-initializers]
  char blahwhatever[0] = "Hello";
                         ^~~~~~~