Misdeclaring "main" (was: Re: system 5 vrs. bsd4.3 question)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <220 at tnl.UUCP> gwollman at tnl.UUCP (Garrett A. Wollman) writes:
-Actually, the whole business of prototyping saves me a considerable
-amount of debugging time.  This allows me to catch errors such as
-passing a char to a function which takes an int, when the char was
-supposed to be unsigned.  (Don't think this is a problem?  Try writing
-to a file, using fputc('\xff',fp).  The '\xff' will be sign-extended to
--1.)

I don't understand your example: '\xff' is an int, fputc() takes an int.
How is the use of prototypes going to help here?  Indeed, why is your
compiler compiling '\xff' as -1?