void main (void)… Not really…

I read a status update on Facebook by my friend stating “void main ( )” and it triggered a train of thoughts. For people who thankfully are not Software Engineers; “void main (void)” is simple piece of code which marks the beginning of a program in C language but its correctness is disputed; from standards to standards this might be true or false. Frankly, I am not writing about the technicality of this code line but the philosophy it reminds me of. This code line brought together my two planes of thought, scientific and philosophical; seemingly disjoint but not really.

Amongst many other categories in which the entire world population is classified; there is one worth mentioning here. The classification goes as under:

a.       “Men of Science” who believe only in the scientific facts and for whom GOD is a mere figment of imagination

b.      “Men of Religion” for whom science in itself is UNHOLY and should be abolished

c.       “Men of Reason” for whom GOD could be a science which is yet to be properly understood

d.      And “Men of Whatever”… the people who can’t care less…

If we believe in the above classification then I am one of the “Men of Reason” so its obvious for me to relate things from science to philosophy. And this notation “void main (void)” seemed so strikingly analogous to the principle of life that I could not resist penning down my thoughts.

Before I trod into the philosophy let us have a little background and a walkthrough of this piece of code. According to latest standards of C coding “void main (void)” is incorrect way of declaration and would generate a warning or error on compilation. What this line of code actually means is “main” is a function which does not accept any input “(void)” and does not return any value (indicated by “void”). It is quite possible that there are no input arguments to the “main” function but it always does something and should return a value to mark or indicate that this function was executed. So according to new standards the declaration for the function most generally used or by default is “int main (void)”; indicating that the function returns a numeric value.

Now let us take a break from this coding and move to literature. I recently read a book “The Five People you meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom. This is an amazingly simple and entertaining book (there is also a movie based on this novel). The book is about a man who dies and goes to HEAVEN. He has to meet 5 people who were affected or who affected his life so that they can teach him something that he missed to learn through this tenure on EARTH before he enjoys his stay in HEAVEN.

The Five Life Lessons to be learnt were:

a.       Everything that happens has a purpose. Every life is connected even the strangers are Family which we haven’t come to know yet.

b.      Sacrifice. It’s the noblest deed we as humans could do. It should be cherished and honored instead of carrying a sense of loss and holding grudge because of that.

c.       Forgiveness; just Let it go. Hatred is a curved blade. The harm we do to others by hating we do that to ourselves too. Hate is built over the years from the things we don’t say; with the things we bury. In the end you need to just let it go.

d.      Love never dies. Love lost is not really lost it just changes from one form to other. Life has to end love doesn’t.

e.      We are where we are supposed to be. Each life affects the other and other the next. The world is full of stories but the stories are all one.

 These five lessons do ring a bell. But how do these relate to the programming function protocol “void main (void)”; and what is the common principle between Philosophy of life and this code line?

Suppose each and every life or person is the “main” character and his entire life is the function/program that executes till the person is alive. As the life comes to an end, it has affected some or the other life and has “returned” something knowingly or unknowingly. Just as there cannot be a warning/error free program with a declaration of void main (void); similarly there can not be a single life that does not affect someone or the other. Even the life which ends even before coming to this world affects a lot. There are loads of people who are “Nobody” but have made a whole load of difference to “Somebody”. Had there been no “Nobodies” in the life of the great men like Alexander the Great, Lord Buddha, Sir Isaac Newton, Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Genius Einstein; they might not have been this great and this world would not have been as we see it today.

So all in all, “void main (void)”… not really… J