Re: systems requiring exit?

[Paul Eggert]

> Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> Hmm, mainframes? I want to say VMS also uses 'return 1' for success
>> (or maybe it even needs exit; I'm not the one that has to deal with
>> our VMS systems).

As I understand it, on VMS, exit(N) is equivalent to main returning N;
it's just that N==1 also means success.  So this is an independent
issue from whether to use exit or return.

Howard Chu <address@hidden> writes:
> Yes, there is a POSIX environment available on the mainframes. It's
> not the most stable thing in the world (return from main() shouldn't
> cause a SEGV, obviously) but it's possible to do useful work in it. I
> ported all of BerkeleyDB, OpenSSL, Cyrus SASL, Heimdal Kerberos, and
> OpenLDAP, and it all ran with reasonable performance.

In that case, it sounds like we should suggest to people that they use
the POSIX environment rather than try to port to a C-only environment.
But I am surprised that a C-only environment would mess up in this
way, even on mainframes.