Question

I’ve been looking over the tutorial here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384843.aspx, but I’m really confused on one point.

MSG msg;
while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
    TranslateMessage(&msg);
    DispatchMessage(&msg);
}

return (int) msg.wParam;

I have no idea what they’re doing with return there. I know return only works with one value. Why are there 2 things? I’ve looked at other tutorials and they all seem to use return msg.wParam;

Answer 1

It is casting the value of msg.wParam to an int. As you can see in the function declaration:

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,
               HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
               LPSTR lpCmdLine,
               int nCmdShow)

the return type is int. I don’t know exactly what the type of the property wParam is, but it is probably not an int, so it has to be explicitly cast to an int or it would not compile.