c - Why main does not return 0 here?

Question

I was just reading

ISO/IEC 9899:201x Committee Draft — April 12, 2011

in which i found under 5.1.2.2.3 Program termination

..reaching the } that terminates the main function returns a value of 0. 

it means if you don't specify any return statement in main(), and if the program runs successfully, then at the closing brace } of main will return 0.

But in the following code i don't specify any return statement, yet it does not return 0

#include<stdio.h>
int sum(int a,int b)
{
return (a + b);
}

int main()
{
    int a=10;
    int b=5;
    int ans;    
    ans=sum(a,b);
    printf("sum is %d",ans);
}

compile

gcc test.c  
./a.out
sum is 15
echo $?
9          // here it should be 0 but it shows 9 why?

Answer 1

That rule was added in the 1999 version of the C standard. In C90, the status returned is undefined.

You can enable it by passing -std=c99 to gcc.

As a side note, interestingly 9 is returned because it's the return of printf which just wrote 9 characters.