C Compiler bugs

[Lawrence V. Cipriani]

In article <8036 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>A freestanding application has every right to define a main() function
>having any valid interface.
Agreed.

>How does one get the compiler to compiler (sic) this code?
As far as the compiler is concerned main is just another subroutine.
A special one, but just another subroutine.  My view of C compilers is
that the name main is not special to the compiler, but when you want to
take .o files and build an executable image there better be one main
routine somewhere in those file for the startup routine to call.
The compiler will automagically add a call to the startup routine to
your program.  I know, I know, so I've only used UNIX C compilers.

>crt0.o has nothing to do with this.
Why not?  Freestanding applications, eg UNIX, have their own magical
way of starting up.  Imagine the chaos that would result if UNIX were
compiled with /lib/crt0.o, yow!  I think the crt0.o file (I spoke of
previously) was recoded to always expect an int from main even if
if it returned something else (our *crt.o files handle startup
and termination).  If the application really needs to return something
else, then it isn't hosted and shouldn't use the "normal" crt0.o files..

I guess I don't see what point I am missing.
-- 
Larry Cipriani, AT&T Network Systems and Ohio State University
Domain: lvc at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Path: ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!lvc (strange but true)