[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...