"Ilya N. Golubev" <gin@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > That systems ignoring `return' value are now rare is not a reason to > do so. It's only part of the reason. The other part is that supporting a proper declaration for 'exit', that works on all modern systems in widespread use (both C and C++), was too much maintenance hassle. Please see <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2006-04/msg00024.html> for the straw that broke the camel's back on this one. > A reasonable solution would be standard tests as described above: > whether the argument to `return' in `main' is ignored, and, if yes, > how to call `exit' properly. Yes, something like that would be reasonable, if someone could take the time to write it, and (more important) test it on the ancient systems where returning a nonzero value from 'main' doesn't conform to the C89 standard. > not even any detailed > description of how that broken `return' would behave to test for, As I recall, SCO 2.3.1 (1989) had a bug where "main () { return 0; }" exited with status 1. Conversely, in older SunOS versions -- I believe it was SunOS 2.0 (1985) through 3.5 (1988) -- "main () { return 1; }" exited with status 0. > Have no systems with broken `return' at hand, That's the fundamental problem. These systems are _ancient_ -- they all predate C89 -- and they are so old that nobody uses them any more. _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
