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The reason why it is undefined behaviour instead of a hard error is that the problem of determining it is, quite literally, equivalent to the halting problem. So any implementation will either warn...
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#1: Initial revision
The reason why it is undefined behaviour instead of a hard error is that the problem of determining it is, quite literally, equivalent to the halting problem. So any implementation will either warn about cases where a return cannot actually happen,or miss cases where it can happen, or both. Different implementations will probably make different tradeoffs when giving that warning, and will differ in the effort they put into deciding whether to warn or not. I wouldn't even rely on different versions of the same compiler giving consistent results.