I'm curious about the practice of using 'return 0' in C. Can anyone explain its significance and maybe share some background on this convention?
1 Answer
Returning '0' is a convention in C that signifies no errors occurred during the execution of a program. This practice likely traces back to early programming languages like BCPL, where a return value of zero meant success. It's important as it allows for a clear distinction between successful execution and various error states, especially when using functions that return status codes. Also, keep in mind that modern standards of other languages may handle returns automatically, but in C, we still need to explicitly return a status code.
That's a good point! I also want to add that since 'main' is defined to return an integer, we need to return something, and instead of hardcoding 0 or -1, we can use macros like EXIT_SUCCESS for better readability.