Thread: Trouble passing args to functions in other files

I have a rather large program that is divided into multiple source code files, and compiled using a Makefile. I'm having problems passing arguments to functions that are in other source code files. The called function seems to ignore the values that are passed in. Indeed it doesn't even care if the right number of arguments are passed in at all.

The following code should illustrate my problem:

first file: main.c

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
  write_arg(1.0,2.0,3.0);
}

second file: sub.c

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

int write_arg(float x)
{
  fprintf(stdout,"value passed in is %g\n",x);
}

Makefile:

Code:

CC = /usr/bin/gcc

test: main.c sub.c
        $(CC) -o test main.c sub.c

If I move the function write_arg in the same file as main(), then the program correctly fails to compile, because it is being called with too many arguments. But if I put write_arg in a separate file, as I did here, then the program compiles and runs successfully, and I get this output:

value passed in is 0

In other words, all of the (too many) values that I passed in were ignored. Can anyone explain to me why?

Thanks in advance.

Sure enough, adding a function prototype fixed the problem.

Thank you!

Actually, now I have a followup question.

I will need to go back through my source code files and make sure that I have added function prototypes to all of them. Is there a compiler directive that I can issue to gcc that will make it warn me if I forget to add a prototype for some function, rather than just compiling and acting like there is no problem?

-Wall works (and gives some other handy things beside). There's probably one specific for prototypes (I think it's -Wno-prototypes or something similar).

Edit: No, I'm wrong according to the manual, it's -Wimplicit-function-declaration.

Thank you all for your help! You've saved me a lot of time and aggravation.