Should I return EXIT_SUCCESS or 0 from main()?

Question

It\'s a simple question, but I keep seeing conflicting answers: should the main routine of a C++ program return 0 or EXIT_SUCCESS?

Answer 1

Once you start writing code that can return a myriad of exit statuses, you start #define'ing all of them. In this case EXIT_SUCCESS makes sense in context of not being a "magic number". This makes your code more readable because every other exit code will be EXIT_SOMETHING. If you simply write a program that will return when it's done, return 0 is valid, and probably even cleaner because it suggests that there's no sophisticated return code structure.