Programming Gotcha - 2

#include<stdio.h>

int test();

int main()
{
    test(1,2);
}

int test()
{
    printf("Got ya!!\n");
}

So what is the output of the above program?

If you think that, it would result in compilation error then try the program yourself! Yeah.. It does not result in any error. Instead the output is

Got ya!!

So why is it like that? As per C standards, any function declaration with blank arguments can take any number of arguments. It is the common silly mistakes most programmers do including me :-).

How do we get out of such problem? Modify the prototype with explicit void declaration

int test(void);

Now the compiler throws up error!

Thanks for one of the nice tutorial I had in office which exposed this type of mistake. Honestly even I did not knew about it.


Note: The code was compiled using gcc on a 64 bit linux machine