Strange lint mumblings

[Simon Elliott]

In article <11467 at dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>, earleh at eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Earle R. Horton) writes:
> In article <416 at marob.MASA.COM> daveh at marob.masa.com (Dave Hammond) writes:
> >Can anyone explain why the statement:
> >    exit(0);	/* followed immediately by main's closing brace */
> >causes lint to complain:
> >(137)  warning: main() returns random value to invocation environment

>	[discussion deleted] 
>      How about:

> 	return(exit(0));
> }

Well, in my manual (Section 2: 'Lint, a C Program Checker' by S.C.Johnson)
there is a section entitled 'Shutting Lint Up', with a comment to the effect
that sometimes the programmer is smarter than lint.

Following is a discussion  of the directives (syntactically comments) that
a programmer can use to let lint know that the programmer really knows what
(s)he is doing.  Among these are:

/*VARARGS*/ preceding a function definition, to let lint know it shouldn't
            complain about variable numbers of arguments to calls of the 
            following function.

/*NOTREACHED*/ to let lint know that a particular spot in the code is
            never executed.

There are several more such directives.

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