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From: dave@cs.arizona.edu (Dave P. Schaumann)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Is void main(void) ANSI standard??
Message-ID: <1135@caslon.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 12 Mar 91 01:35:41 GMT
References: <1991Mar11.085439.1@sysjj.mdcbbs.com>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 30

In article <1991Mar11.085439.1@sysjj.mdcbbs.com> hooverm@sysjj.mdcbbs.com (SQUID 6 on the DARK side) writes:
>When a program is compiled/linked and there is no value returned to main,
>certain platforms will return a warning message stating that this function
>doesn't return a value.
>
>I thought that by declaring:  void main(void)  that I would get around this.
>
>Is this ANSI standard?  If it is valid, why doesn't my SUN SparcStation like
>it? [...]

Well, first you have to understant that one of the oddities of C (IMHO) is
that if you declare a function like this:

main() { ... }

The return type becomes "int" by implication.  This is probably not the best
idea in the world, but the backward-compatability crowd wouldn't have it
any other way.

Declaring main as a void is *not* a good idea.  Many systems take the value
returned by main() to be the "exit status" of the program.  (Usually, a
value of 0 means all is well, and a non-0 value means some kind of error
has occurred).  If you don't really care about this, just put a return 0 ;
(or exit(0)), and all should be well.

Of course, you should see another thread appearing in this group for a
discussion about return values under VMS.

-- 
Dave Schaumann | dave@cs.arizona.edu | Short .sig's rule!