How to indicate when purposely ignoring a return value

Question

In some situations using C/C++, I can syntactically indicate to the compiler that a return value is purposely ignored:

int SomeOperation()
{
    // Do the operat         


        

Answer 1

I can only think of one situation, when a "return value" is not allowed to be ignored in C#: when an error occurred. This should be provided by throwing an exception, which makes it impossible to be ignored.

In other cases, it is (or better: must be) completely safe and not smelly at all to ignore return values.

I still can't see the point. Why should this improve the code? You specify to ignore the return value by purpose by not assigning it to a variable.

• If you don't need this value in your code, everything is fine.
• If you need it, you won't be able to write your code.
• If there is a special case which must be handled and must never be implicitly ignored, an exception should be thrown.
• If the called method did not have a return value and gets one later, it must be designed to not break existing code which ignores it. The existing calling code does not change.

Did I forget a case?