What happens to unused function return values?

Question

If I have a program:

#include 

using namespace std;

int TestIntReturn(int &x, int &y)
{
    x = 1000;
    y = 1000;
    return x+y;         


        

Answer 1

Everybody answered correctly - the return value in this case is simply discarded, and in this specific example, you can ignore it.

However, if the return value is a pointer to memory allocated inside the function, and you ignore it, you'll have a memory leak.

So some function values you can't just ignore, but in this case - you can.