Incomputer programming, an infinite loop (or endless loop)[1][2] is a sequence of instructions that, as written, will continue endlessly, unless an external intervention occurs, such as turning off power via a switch or pulling a plug. It may be intentional.
An infinite loop is a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops endlessly, either due to the loop having no terminating condition,[4] having one that can never be met, or one that causes the loop to start over. In older operating systems with cooperative multitasking,[5] infinite loops normally caused the entire system to become unresponsive. With the now-prevalent preemptive multitasking model, infinite loops usually cause the program to consume all available processor time, but can usually be terminated by a user. Busy wait loops are also sometimes called "infinite loops". Infinite loops are one possible cause for a computer hanging or freezing; others include thrashing, deadlock, and access violations.
There are a few situations when this is desired behavior. For example, the games on cartridge-based game consoles typically have no exit condition in their main loop, as there is no operating system for the program to exit to; the loop runs until the console is powered off.
Modern interactive computers require that the computer constantly be monitoring for user input or device activity, so at some fundamental level there is an infinite processing idle loop that must continue until the device is turned off or reset. In the Apollo Guidance Computer, for example, this outer loop was contained in the Exec program,[6] and if the computer had absolutely no other work to do, it would loop run a dummy job that would simply turn off the "computer activity" indicator light.
Modern computers also typically do not halt the processor or motherboard circuit-driving clocks when they crash. Instead they fall back to an error condition displaying messages to the operator (such as the blue screen of death), and enter an infinite loop waiting for the user to either respond to a prompt to continue, or reset the device.
Spinlocks are low-level synchronization mechanisms used in concurrent programming to protect shared resources. Unlike traditional locks that put a thread to sleep when it can't acquire the lock, spinlocks repeatedly "spin" in an infinite loop until the lock becomes available. This intentional infinite looping is a deliberate design choice aimed at minimizing the time a thread spends waiting for the lock and avoiding the overhead of higher level synchronisation mechanisms such as mutexes.
In multi-threaded programs some threads can be executing inside infinite loops without causing the entire program to be stuck in an infinite loop. If the main thread exits, all threads of the process are forcefully stopped, thus all execution ends and the process/program terminates. The threads inside the infinite loops can perform "housekeeping" tasks or they can be in a blocked state waiting for input (from socket/queue) and resume execution every time input is received.
Most often, the term is used for those situations when this is not the intended result; that is, when this is a bug.[7] Such errors are most common by novice programmers, but can be made by experienced programmers also, because their causes can be quite subtle.
One common cause, for example, is that a programmer intends to iterate over sequence of nodes in a data structure such as a linked list or tree, executing the loop code once for each node. Improperly formed links can create a reference loop in the data structure, where one node links to another that occurs earlier in the sequence. This makes part of the data structure into a ring, causing naive code to loop forever.
While most infinite loops can be found by close inspection of the code, there is no general method to determine whether a given program will ever halt or will run forever; this is the undecidability of the halting problem.[8]
As long as the system is responsive, infinite loops can often be interrupted by sending a signal to the process (such as SIGINT in Unix), or an interrupt to the processor, causing the current process to be aborted. This can be done in a task manager, in a terminal with the Control-C command,[9] or by using the kill command or system call. However, this does not always work, as the process may not be responding to signals or the processor may be in an uninterruptible state, such as in the Cyrix coma bug (caused by overlapping uninterruptible instructions in an instruction pipeline). In some cases other signals such as SIGKILL can work, as they do not require the process to be responsive, while in other cases the loop cannot be terminated short of system shutdown.
Infinite loops can be implemented using various control flow constructs. Most commonly, in unstructured programming this is jump back up (goto), while in structured programming this is an indefinite loop (while loop) set to never end, either by omitting the condition or explicitly setting it to true, as while (true) ....
This creates a situation where x will never be greater than 5, since at the start of the loop code, x is assigned the value of 1 (regardless of any previous value) before it is changed to x + 1. Thus the loop will always result in x = 2 and will never break. This could be fixed by moving the x = 1 instruction outside the loop so that its initial value is set only once.
On some systems, this loop will execute ten times as expected, but on other systems it will never terminate. The problem is that the loop terminating condition (x != 1.1) tests for exact equality of two floating point values, and the way floating point values are represented in many computers will make this test fail, because they cannot represent the value 0.1 exactly, thus introducing rounding errors on each increment (cf. box).
Because of the likelihood of tests for equality or not-equality failing unexpectedly, it is safer to use greater-than or less-than tests when dealing with floating-point values. For example, instead of testing whether x equals 1.1, one might test whether (x
A similar problem occurs frequently in numerical analysis: in order to compute a certain result, an iteration is intended to be carried out until the error is smaller than a chosen tolerance. However, because of rounding errors during the iteration, the specified tolerance can never be reached, resulting in an infinite loop.
One common example of such situation is an email loop. An example of an email loop is if someone receives mail from a no reply inbox, but their auto-response is on. They will reply to the no reply inbox, triggering the "this is a no reply inbox" response. This will be sent to the user, who then sends an auto reply to the no-reply inbox, and so on and so forth.
It appears that this will go on indefinitely, but in fact the value of i will eventually reach the maximum value storable in an unsigned int and adding 1 to that number will wrap-around to 0, breaking the loop. The actual limit of i depends on the details of the system and compiler used. With arbitrary-precision arithmetic, this loop would continue until the computer's memory could no longer hold i. If i was a signed integer, rather than an unsigned integer, overflow would be undefined. In this case, the compiler could optimize the code into an infinite loop.
Alderson loop is a rare slang or jargon term for an infinite loop where there is an exit condition available, but inaccessible in an implementation of the code, typically due to a programmer error. These are most common and visible while debugging user interface code.
The term allegedly received its name from a programmer (last name Alderson) who in 1996[12] had coded a modal dialog box in Microsoft Access without either an OK or Cancel button, thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up.[13]
Is there a certain form which one should choose? And do modern compilers make a difference between the middle and the last statement or does it realize that it is an endless loop and skips the checking part entirely?
The problem with asking this question is that you'll get so many subjective answers that simply state "I prefer this...". Instead of making such pointless statements, I'll try to answer this question with facts and references, rather than personal opinions.
Through experience, we can probably start by excluding the do-while alternatives (and the goto), as they are not commonly used. I can't recall ever seeing them in live production code, written by professionals.
For a long while (but not forever), this book was regarded as canon and the very definition of the C language. Since K&R decided to show an example of for(;;), this would have been regarded as the most correct form at least up until the C standardization in 1990.
And today, K&R is a very questionable source to use as a canonical C reference. Not only is it outdated several times over (not addressing C99 nor C11), it also preaches programming practices that are often regarded as bad or blatantly dangerous in modern C programming.
Based on this text from the standard, I think most will agree that it is not only obscure, it is subtle as well, since the 1st and 3rd part of the for loop are treated differently than the 2nd, when omitted.
This is supposedly a more readable form than for(;;). However, it relies on another obscure, although well-known rule, namely that C treats all non-zero expressions as boolean logical true. Every C programmer is aware of that, so it is not likely a big issue.
There is one big, practical problem with this form, namely that compilers tend to give a warning for it: "condition is always true" or similar. That is a good warning, of a kind which you really don't want to disable, because it is useful for finding various bugs. For example a bug such as while(i = 1), when the programmer intended to write while(i == 1).
When it comes to C, this form has another disadvantage, namely that it uses the macro true from stdbool.h. So in order to make this compile, we need to include a header file, which may or may not be inconvenient. In C++ this isn't an issue, since bool exists as a primitive data type and true is a language keyword.
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