warning: return type defaults to ‘int’ [-Wreturn-type]
I'm a Linux user who started learning C and I'm trying to compile this source that I typed:
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
float c,d;
c = 10215.3;
d = c / 3;
printf("%3.2f\n",d);
return 0;
}
It compiled with this using a makefile that I wrote:
cc -Wall -g printf.c -o printf
but I'm getting this warning:
printf.c:2:1: warning: return type defaults to ‘int’ [-Wreturn-type]
it compiles the code and I get the desired output but I want to understand what this means
main()
should be
int main()
In C89, the default return type is assumed to be int
, that's why it works.
In C89, the default return type is int. This default was removed in C99 and compilers are helpful reminding you that your C-style with no int before main() is out of date.
See the C89 specification Section 3.5.2 "Type specifiers":
"Each list of type specifiers shall be one of the following sets: [...] + int, signed, signed int, or no type specifiers".
And in the second paragraph of semantics: "Each of the [...] sets designates the same type, except that for bit-fields [blabla]". So this means "no type specifiers" is the same as int.
In C99, the part "or no type specifier" is removed. (But you can still write signed without the int part.)