What's the point of function prototyping?

Question

I'm following a guide to learn curses, and all of the C code within prototypes functions before main(), then defines them afterward. In my C++ learnings, I had heard about function prototyping but never done it, and as far as I know it doesn't make too much of a difference on how the code is compiled. Is it a programmer's personal choice more than anything else? If so, why was it included in C at all?

Answer 1

In C prototyping is needed so that your program knows that you have a function called x() when you have not gotten to defining it, that way y() knows that there is and exists a x(). C does top down compilation, so it needs to be defined before hand is the short answer.

x();
y();
main(){

}

y(){
x();
}

x(){
...
more code ...
maybe even y();
}

Answer 2

Function prototyping originally wasn't included in C. When you called a function, the compiler just took your word for it that it would exist and took the type of arguments you provided. If you got the argument order, number, or type wrong, too bad – your code would fail, possibly in mysterious ways, at runtime.

Later versions of C added function prototyping in order to address these problems. Your arguments are implicitly converted to the declared types under some circumstances or flagged as incompatible with the prototype, and the compiler could flag as an error the wrong order and number of types. This had the side effect of enabling varargs functions and the special argument handling they require.

Note that, in C (and unlike in C++), a function declared foo_t func() is not the same as a function declared as foo_t func(void). The latter is prototyped to have no arguments. The former declares a function without a prototype.