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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

The comp.lang.c FAQ (which is quite well respected as a good authorative source on C, I think) states:

Q: What's the correct declaration of main()?

A: There are two valid declarations:

    int main(void)
    int main(int argc, char **argv)

Yet, Knuth states:

    main()

This feels like Knuth has done a Chuck Norris on C.

That's K&R C:

Only problem - that ain't C. ;)

I assume this is what CTANGLE produces, in which case your rebuttal of unwind's point is flawed.

However, C99 section 6.9.1 "Function definitions" asserts that

    int f(void) { /* ... */ }

is equivalent to

    int f() { /* ... */ }

Note that this is not true of a function declaration since

    int f();

means function accepting unspecified arguments.

Oh? What language is it? At first glance it looked like C.

It's CWEB (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cweb.html) A language based on C devised by Knuth as a language for "Literate Programming" (http://www.literateprogramming.com/)

I haven't done any C programming for years, so correct me if I am wrong. IIRC main() is interpreted as int main() by some compilers.