Why does flowing off the end of a non-void function without returning a value not produce a compiler error?

Question

Ever since I realized many years ago, that this doesn\'t produce an error by default (in GCC at least), I\'ve always wondered why?

I understand that you can issue co

Answer 1

I believe this is because of legacy code (C never required return statement so did C++). There is probably huge code base relying on that "feature". But at least there is -Werror=return-type flag on many compilers (including gcc and clang).