This makes no sense - the message is saying there's an error on line 170 of the file bch.cc. The file isn't that long.

right. well its not supposed to be. for some reason after trying to enable the debugger the code in the .cc file was sort of copied and appended back into the file; four times for me. so i surrounded the code in the .h file with the #ifndef statements, deleted the duplicate code in the .cc file, and rebuilt receiving no more make errors.