Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Misdeclaring "main" (was: Re: system 5 vrs. bsd4.3 question)
Message-ID: <10588@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 23 Jul 89 10:21:41 GMT
References: <28398@beta.lanl.gov> <14020068@hpisod2.HP.COM> <2268@auspex.auspex.com> <220@tnl.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <220@tnl.UUCP> gwollman@tnl.UUCP (Garrett A. Wollman) writes:
-Actually, the whole business of prototyping saves me a considerable
-amount of debugging time.  This allows me to catch errors such as
-passing a char to a function which takes an int, when the char was
-supposed to be unsigned.  (Don't think this is a problem?  Try writing
-to a file, using fputc('\xff',fp).  The '\xff' will be sign-extended to
--1.)

I don't understand your example: '\xff' is an int, fputc() takes an int.
How is the use of prototypes going to help here?  Indeed, why is your
compiler compiling '\xff' as -1?