• Hirom@beehaw.org
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    11 hours ago

    An infinite loop canot be ruled out in the last case, so a compiler couldn’t optimize this away without potentially changing the program behavior.

        • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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          8 hours ago

          Even though this isn’t C, but if we take from the C11 draft §6.8.5 point 6 (https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf):

          An iteration statement whose controlling expression is not a constant expression, that performs no input/output operations, does not access volatile objects, and performs no synchronization or atomic operations in its body, controlling expression, or (in the case of a for statement) its expression-3, may be assumed by the implementation to terminate

          “new Random().nextInt()” might perform I/O though so it could still be defined behavior. Or the compiler does not assume this assumption.

          But an aggressive compiler could realize the loop would not terminate if x does not become 10 so x must be 10 because the loop can be assumed to terminate.