this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I disagree. It's a while loop, because a for-loop is finite, so you can't count to infinity with it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

there is no reason for a (non-foreach) for loop to be any more or less finite than a while loop.

for (a; b; c)
{
  d;
}

is just syntactic sugar for

{
  a;
  while (b)
  {
    d;
    c;
  }
}

in most or all languages with c-like syntax.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

for (i=0; true; i++)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There's nothing special about a generic for loop (at least in C-like languages). There's no reason you couldn't do something like for (i = 0; true; i++) to make it infinite. Some languages even support an infinite list generator syntax like for i in [0..] (e.g. it lazily generates 0, then 1, then 2, etc. on each iteration) so you can use a for-each style loop to iterate infinitely.

Now, whether or not you should do such things is another question entirely. I won't pretend there aren't any instances where it's useful, but most of the time you're better off with a different structure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I wanna see how you get a while loop to actually go to infinity. I'll wait...

on second thought, no I won't.