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Beautiful code is simple maintainable code. In C this is a simple as:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) { puts("42"); return 0; }

Beautiful code denies its own existence so perfectly you forgot you wrote it

I was curious why you would return a value and not just make the main function return void (in the interests of simplicity and maintainability, and assuming you're using C not C++). So I wrote my own such program, and discovered that void main(void) returns 3 to the OS. Any ideas why?

Because returning void means that, on most platform, return whatever is left in %eax at the time of function termination.

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