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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.
Loop variants are used to guarantee that loops will terminate. A loop invariant is an assertion which must be true before the first loop iteration and remain true after each iteration. This implies that when a loop terminates correctly, both the exit condition and the loop invariant are satisfied.
Some infinite loops can be quite useful. For instance, event loops are typically coded as infinite loops. [1] However, most subroutines are intended to finish. [2] In particular, in hard real-time computing, programmers attempt to write subroutines that are not only guaranteed to finish, but are also guaranteed to finish before a given deadline ...
A do-while loop provides for the action's ongoing execution until the condition is no longer true. It is possible and sometimes desirable for the condition to always evaluate to be true. This creates an infinite loop. When an infinite loop is created intentionally there is usually another control structure that allows termination of the loop.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
Loop unrolling, also known as loop unwinding, is a loop transformation technique that attempts to optimize a program's execution speed at the expense of its binary size, which is an approach known as space–time tradeoff. The transformation can be undertaken manually by the programmer or by an optimizing compiler.