From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] the declaration of main()
From: forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <20010424081352.B166E19A61@mail.cse.psu.edu>
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 09:10:56 +0100
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8d76355e-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

i realised later that i hadn't pointed out that regardless whether
int main was a good choice for the C standard, it had further
disadvantages in plan 9.

plan 9 does not use an integer for exit status: it uses a string.
if it's considered desirable to return status from main, it would
need to be char*, which is still different from the C standard.
it could remain int if a return of zero mapped to "" and
non-zero mapped to "glenda", but exits(char*) would still
need to be called by main in general.  if that appears at the
end of main, compilers that detect flowing off the end of
a function-returning-value will either give a diagnostic
or need some hack (another pragma, great) to know about
exits.  all right, you could have some function to set a int->char*
map for the return value of main but things are
already getting out of hand.   void main was the better choice.