Re: The semicolon habit

graham.matthews@maths.anu.edu.au writes:
>salomon@silver.cs.umanitoba.ca (Daniel J. Salomon) writes:
[snip]
>> while(x < 10.0);
>>and not notice the error. There is no syntax error here, but this
statement
>>is almost certainly a run-time error.
>
>To my mind this is a *semantic* rather than syntactic flaw in C.
[snip]
[Keep in mind that if x is volatile, that's a reasonable thing to write.
It's a subtle issue. -John]


We wrote a C compiler for a client's DSP chip. The sample code they gave us
had lots of these indefinite while loops. They looped on a volatile
memory-mapped I/O location until it, for example, went non-zero. They use
this idiom to synchronize with other components in their execution
environment.


Paul Long
plong@perf.com


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