Quick, what’s wrong with this C++ program?

#include <iostream>

int test(int arg) {
    cout << arg << endl;
}

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    test(5);
}

Did you guess nothing at all? Because that’s what GCC says:

$ g++ -o funnyprogram funnyprogram.cpp
$

WTF.

Pretty much every other programming language that makes you explicitly identify a function’s return type will also make you actually return something from that function. C and C++ don’t, and furthermore GCC doesn’t even warn you that anything is wrong. This can occasionally lead to serious bugs, as I discovered today in this real-world example. I had a function that checks the name of an object and returns an enum value based on that name.

virtual const HardFactorOrder get_order() const {
    // relies on a particular convention for get_name()
    // but can be overridden for hard factors where that convention doesn't apply
    std::string name = get_name();
    if (name.compare(0, 3, "H01") == 0) {
        return MIXED;
    }
    else if (name.compare(0, 2, "H0") == 0) {
        return LO;
    }
    else if (name.compare(0, 2, "H1") == 0) {
        return NLO;
    }
};

That was all good when all the objects involved had names conforming to the convention, but my latest batch of updates to …