problem with Apple's customised gcc compiler

[Tony Han Bao]

Dear all,

I'm a third year computer science student from University of Wales, 
Swansea. First time using this mailing list, I need some help.

There is a problem regarding Apple's customised gcc compiler.

Current default compiler:
gcc version 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)

I was working on a project when I discovered this rather strange error.

This project uses C++ templates and generic programming heavily. Inside 
a class, I wrote a toy member function as follows,

void debug() {
return 1;
}

However this obvious error was not reported by the compiler when 
compiling the entire (rather large) project.

Then I wrote the same function in a separate file and tried to compile 
that file, the error was then reported by the same compiler.

My questions are:

Is there a known bug in the above compiler that caused this?

If not, could this be a bug?

Or could there be some other problem that causes the compiler to behave 
like this?

Could it be that the compiler optimised away some code and over looked 
this error? Is there any compiler options that could enforce this error 
checking?

One last unrelated question, can I use the true gcc compiler (not 
apple's customised version) on a mac?

Thank you all for your time, please help.

Tony