[pjscott]

I am slightly bothered by the lack of a '\n'.

[tmcb]

You're not the only one.

[0x12]

Think of it as an open ending, there is still much more to come.

[mmacaulay]

Yes, but what better metaphor for new beginnings than a "new line"? :-)

[camperman]

As both programmer and journalist, I can guess what happened behind the scenes. The author probably originally put in the newline into his headline but was overruled by the editor who felt that it would have distracted too many non-technical people. You and I see the correctness of the \n but a non-programmer will just see it as strange noise or punctuation.

He allowed him the C statement but kept it simplified - a good compromise I think.

[yxhuvud]

I'm more bothered by the lack of #include and abysmal function signature.

[drdaeman]

My first thought, too.

Quite surprising, though, at least as Wikipedia claims¹, this (except for the lack of "\n") was the exact "hello world" code from the first edition of K&R.

____

¹) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)#.22Hel... and I don't have any copy of the first edition.

[keithpeter]

I'm glad you said that. I thought it was just me.

[matthavener]

Why?

[mhartl]

The code

    printf("goodbye, Dennis");

would give

    $ ./goodbye
    goodbye, Dennis$ 

What you want is to add a newline ('\n') at the end:

    printf("goodbye, Dennis\n");

Now you get

    $ ./goodbye
    goodbye, Dennis
    $

That's why the canonical "hello, world" program contains the line

    printf("hello, world\n");

[Lukeas14]

"\n" is a linebreak which would guarantee the text is printed and place whatever output came afterwards on the next line.

[derefr]

Isn't the output stream at least guaranteed to be flushed once on completion of the program, though?

[djcapelis]

Yes, it flushes completely outputting all characters. None of which contain a newline.

Flushing doesn't automatically add newlines for you in C. It flushes the buffers you gave it, it doesn't make new stuff up to print out along with your buffers.

[derefr]

(Right, I didn't mean to suggest it added a newline; just that adding a newline flushes the buffer, which was one half of the problem with missing a newline—but that if this is the only line of the program, this half of the problem is obviated.)

[getsat]

Adding a newline doesn't flush anything. You'd want to call fflush() to do that.