Re:C Internals
by fanf2 on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @05:27AM
(#23389248)
The void keyword predates ANSI C by several years. It was introduced in pcc in the early 1980s during the effort to improve the portability of Unix, which included improving the type safety of C. Steve Johnson, author of pcc and lint, recently wrote about the origin of void - https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-May/021034.html
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Good point. "void" does not appear in K&R1 (1978), and there was no definitive manual for the language between that and the ANSI standard, but it did start appearing in implementations.
Still, I'm not aware of any implementation that explicitly supported void as the return type of main. (Many compilers would accept just about any return type without complaint.)
Somehow some authors got the idea that "void main()" was a good idea. I find it to be a good way to detect authors who don't know the language very well.