Re: Function declared returning something returns nothing

Re: Function declared returning something returns nothing

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 22, 1999, Edward_C_Morgan <ecmorgan@lucent.com> wrote:

> My question is: Shouldn't the compiler warned about functions not
> returning anything, or at least not returning what it says it
> returns?

It warns with -Wall.  According to the standard, falling off the end
of a function that does not return void produces undefined
results. (except for main(), that implicitly returns 0)

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Brasil
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Function declared returning something returns nothing

[Edward_C_Morgan]

I ran into something running egcs 1.1.2 (egcs-2.91.66) on sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1

I have a function as follows:

string
foo()
{
    ....
    // Don't return a string
    ...
}

When I call this function up, the compiler dutifully calls up the dtor for the
string that foo returns after it goes out of
scope.  The problem is that since foo didn't really return a string, the dtor
grabs any memory location and performs the
dtor on it.  (In my case it happened to be an adjacent string.)

My question is:  Shouldn't the compiler warned about functions not returning
anything, or at least not returning what it says it returns?

--
=========================================
 Edward C. Morgan
 Email:  ecmorgan@lucent.com
=========================================