alt Hacker NewsNow I haven't touched C++ in probably 15 years but the definition of main() looks confused:
> auto main() -> int
Isn't that declaring the return type twice, once as auto and the other as int?
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maccard • yesterday at 8:40 PM
I really wish they had used func instead, it would have saved this confusion and allowed for “auto type deduction” to be a smaller more self contained feature
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No. The auto there is doing some lifting so that you can declare the type afterwards. The return type is only defined once.
There is, however, a return type auto-deduction in recent standards iirc, which is especially useful for lambdas.
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/auto.html
auto f() -> int; // OK: f returns int
auto g() { return 0.0; } // OK since C++14: g returns double
auto h(); // OK since C++14: h’s return type will be deduced when it is defined