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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: why is free() a void?
Message-ID: <14365@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 7 Nov 90 09:04:05 GMT
References: <1749@meaddata.meaddata.com> <1990Oct24.211905.225@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <2604@cirrusl.UUCP>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <2604@cirrusl.UUCP> dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>Both free() and (*handler)() used to return int at one time.

They certainly did not.

Before the "void" type was added to the C language, the only way to declare
or define a function that didn't return a value was to just omit its return
type.  Unfortunately, as a programmer convenience the common type "int" was
also permitted to be elided in many declarations, including as the return
type for a function declaration/definition.  Thus, an actually-void function
had type indistinguishable from function-returning-int.  After "void" was
added, we cleaned up this overloading.  Old-style actually-void function
code for the most part will continue to work, signal handlers being the
notable exception.  (And even they generally continue to work in nearly all
implementations.)