Comment by toth

Well, actually... the "main" function is handled specially in the standard. It is the only one where the return type is not void and you don't need to explicitly return from it - if you do it, it is treated as if you returned 0. (You will most definitely get a compiler error if you try this with any other function.)

You might say this is very silly, and you'd be right. But as quirks of C++ go it is one of the most benign ones. As usual it is there for backwards compatibility.

And, for what it's worth, the uber-bean counter didn't miss a bean here...