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From: Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Baby X is bor nagain
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2024 12:18:35 +0300
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 20:55:54 +0100
bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:

> On 29/06/2024 18:46, Richard Harnden wrote:
> > On 29/06/2024 15:14, bart wrote:
> > [...]  
> >> My older bcc compiler reported 4 as a hard error unless an
> >> override was used.  
> > 
> > But you didn't say anything about main's args.  
> 
> I did, indirectly. The actual error was the use of "()" as an empty 
> parameter list (for any function, not just main, but my example could 
> also have been 'void H(){H(123);}'). If you tried to compile:
> 
>     int main() {
>         main(123);
>     }
> 
> then it wouldn't get past the () to the call.
> 
> Eventually I dropped that restriction, and the reason was that so
> much code used such parameter lists, for any function.
> 
> Not because they wanted unchecked args (there are some legitimate 
> use-cases within function pointer types), but because so many people 
> assumed () meant zero parameters like (void).
> 
> Why was such code so common? Presumably because compilers said
> nothing; and they couldn't because the language allowed it. If they
> had required an override like mine did, more would have got the
> message.
>

I tried following code:
int foo() { return 1; }

Both MSVC and clang warn about it at high warnings level (-Wall for
MSVC, -Wpedantic for clang). But they don't warn at levels that most
people use in practice (-W3 or -W4 for MSVC, -Wall for clang). 
gcc13 produces no warning even at -Wpedantic. It does produce warning
with '-Wpedantic -std=xxx' for all values of xxx except c23 and gnu23.
The absence of warning for c23/gnu23 makes sense, the rest of gcc
behavior - less so.

> Now it's too late because apparently the meaning of () is changing to 
> mean (void). All those people who got it wrong (and introduced a 
> dangerous bug) have won!
>