Probable bugs in egcs-19981220 and autoconf 2.12

[Roberto Bagnara]

Hi there,

I discovered the following while using autoconf 2.12
together with egcs-19981220/g++. Autoconf uses the following
program to check whether the C++ compiler works:

#line 894 "configure"
#include "confdefs.h"
main(){return(0);}

If the -Wall option is used, then egcs-19981220 rejects it with

  ANSI C++ forbids declaration `main' with no type

Instead, without options (i.e., without -Wall) it accepts
the program happily. Note that egcs-1.1.1 does not have
this problem.
So maybe we have two bugs here:

1) in egcs-19981220 the successful compilation of a program
   should not depend on -Wall being given, unless one requests
   also the turning of warnings into errors (which is not the
   case here);

2) in autoconf 2.12, I think an "int" should precede "main".
   I can see only benefits from doing that, and this independently
   from the C++ compiler in question.

Keep up the great work,
and best wishes to you all.

               Roberto

-- 
Roberto Bagnara
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.di.unipi.it/~bagnara/bagnara.html
mailto:bagnara@di.unipi.it