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From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: IBM RT compiler weirdness
Message-ID: <1021@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: Mon, 31-Aug-87 11:32:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: haddock.1021
Posted: Mon Aug 31 11:32:48 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Sep-87 05:24:03 EDT
References: <261@calyx.UUCP> <8258@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 27

In article <8258@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>Try including
>	#ifdef lint
>	thing_to_call_main() { exit(main(0, (char **)0); }
>	#endif
>somewhere in the program so that lint will compare the return value
>of main with the argument type for exit().

Interesting idea.  You should also declare "extern void exit();" (except on
BSD systems where exit is misdeclared in llib-lc!) to minimize the number of
new warnings.

Also, some of us consider it perfectly valid practice to define main() with no
arguments and/or no return value.  This would elicit a warning or two if your
suggested function is in place.

I'd say the best thing to do is to add it to lint.  There is already a partial
precedent, in that some versions of lint recognize "main" as a special case so
they can warn about falling off the bottom of the function.  In my view, there
are nine correct models for main, represented by the Cartesian product of {
"main()", "main(argc, argv)", "main(argc, argv, envp)" } with { "void main()",
"int main() { ... }", "int main() { ... return VALUE; }".%

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint
%In the two cases where main does not return a value, it is presumed that it
does not return at all.  It would be nice if lint would verify this, too, but
that's a separate issue.