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The form for (;;) for an infinite loop is traditional, appearing in the standard reference The C Programming Language, and is often punningly pronounced "forever". [11] This is a loop that will print "Infinite Loop" without halting. A similar example in 1980s-era BASIC:
The following example is done in Ada which supports both early exit from loops and loops with test in the middle. Both features are very similar and comparing both code snippets will show the difference: early exit must be combined with an if statement while a condition in the middle is a self-contained construct.
After completing all the statements in the loop body, the condition, (x < 5), is checked again, and the loop is executed again, this process repeating until the variable x has the value 5. It is possible, and in some cases desirable, for the condition to always evaluate to true, creating an infinite loop .
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.
Circular references like the above example may return valid results if they have a terminating condition. If there is no terminating condition, a circular reference leads to a condition known as livelock or infinite loop, meaning it theoretically could run forever.
If the loop is checking something simple then it will spend most of its time asleep and will waste very little CPU time. In programs that never end (such as operating systems), infinite busy waiting can be implemented by using unconditional jumps as shown by this NASM syntax: jmp $. The CPU will unconditionally jump to its own position forever ...
Here is an example of the C-style traditional for-loop in Java. // Prints the numbers from 0 to 99 (and not 100), ... When infinite loops are intended, this type of ...
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 ...