Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Should I cast to (void) when I do not use the return value

Parent

Should I cast to (void) when I do not use the return value

+8
−0

I saw at least one compiler (Codewarrior for HC12) warn me if I use a function without using it's return value. Other compilers (clang/gcc) do not issue a warning though, even when using the std=90 argument.

So should I generally cast the unused return value of a function to (void)?

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

0 comment threads

Post
+7
−0

Yes, it is generally good practice to always cast the return value of functions to (void) if not used. This is self-documenting code showing that you aren't using the return value on purpose and did not just forget it by accident.

For reference, either using the return value or casting it to void is enforced by MISRA-C (17.7) and other coding quality standards.

Hosted system compilers generally don't warn out of tradition, because that would mean that we'd have to write (void) printf("hello world"); and similar when using common functions, where the result is not commonly used. This whole sloppiness goes all the way back to the first K&R book. Which is a shame really, since in the case of scanf etc, it is definitely good practice to always check the result.

Codewarrior is more pedantic than hosted system compilers, because it is intended to be exclusively used for embedded systems and you aren't as likely to use stdio.h and similar libs there. Similarly, Codewarrior is intended to be suitable for automotive systems, where quality standards are much higher than those for PC programming.

This has nothing to do with C90 as such.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

General comments (2 comments)
General comments
Estela‭ wrote over 4 years ago

When you write that it is generally a good practice instead of writing always, do you mean there are specific cases where it is not a good practice?

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@Estela It turns cumbersome to cast everything to void when using various common, poorly-designed standard library functions such as printf, strcpy etc. You do not commonly use the result of those (since it's useless most of the time).