[Koshkin]

Isn’t that why some other languages explicitly draw a distinction between a function and a procedure? I think ‘void’ was introduced in C to do the same thing, implicitly (because omitting the return type does not achieve that).

[WalterBright]

Yes, but Wirth (Pascal's inventor) was an academic, which is why Pascal has a separate notion of functions and procedures. `void` is a hackish special case in the type system, and not just for function returns. It's unsound.