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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.
For example, in pseudocode, the program while (true) continue. does not halt; rather, it goes on forever in an infinite loop. On the other hand, the program print "Hello, world!" does halt. While deciding whether these programs halt is simple, more complex programs prove problematic.
Some loops can be shown to always terminate or never terminate through human inspection. For example, the following loop will, in theory, never stop. However, it may halt when executed on a physical machine due to arithmetic overflow : either leading to an exception or causing the counter to wrap to a negative value and enabling the loop ...
For example, a break statement would allow termination of an infinite loop. Some languages may use a different naming convention for this type of loop. For example, the Pascal and Lua languages have a "repeat until" loop, which continues to run until the control expression is true and then terminates. In contrast a "while" loop runs while the ...
For example, in C++ one can write: try ... In Ada, the above loop construct (loop-while-repeat) can be represented using a standard infinite loop (loop - end loop) ...
It is possible, and in some cases desirable, for the condition to always evaluate to true, creating an infinite loop. When such a loop is created intentionally, there is usually another control structure (such as a break statement) that controls termination of the loop. For example:
The loop counter is used to decide when the loop should terminate and for the program flow to continue to the next instruction after the loop. A common identifier naming convention is for the loop counter to use the variable names i , j , and k (and so on if needed), where i would be the most outer loop, j the next inner loop, etc.
A conditional loop has the potential to become an infinite loop when nothing in the loop's body can affect the outcome of the loop's conditional statement. However, infinite loops can sometimes be used purposely, often with an exit from the loop built into the loop implementation for every computer language , but many share the same basic ...