Hi Andy,
On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 11:39 AM Andy Shevchenko andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 10:03:53AM +0100, Thomas Zimmermann wrote:
Am 11.02.22 um 16:41 schrieb Andy Shevchenko:
IMO *always* prefer a for loop over while or do-while.
The for (i = 0; i < N; i++) is such a strong paradigm in C. You instantly know how many times you're going to loop, at a glance. Not so with with the alternatives, which should be used sparingly.
while () {} _is_ a paradigm, for-loop is syntax sugar on top of it.
Naw, that's not true.
In the section 3.5 "Loops - While and For" in "The C Programming Language" 2nd by K&R, the authors said:
The for statement ... is equivalent to ... while..."They said that for is equivalent to while, and not otherwise.
When I learned C, people told me to prefer while() over for() when possible, as several compilers are better at optimizing while()-loops than for()-loops.
During the last 3 decades, optimizers got better, and all the bad old compilers went the way of the dodo (see also [1])... But even for a human, it's still less symbols to decode (and verify all the details about =/</>/<=/>=/++/--/...) for
while (n--) { ... }
than for
for (i = 0; i < n; i++) { ... }
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/871283/
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
-- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds