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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:
One example application of recursion is in parsers for programming languages. The great advantage of recursion is that an infinite set of possible sentences, designs or other data can be defined, parsed or produced by a finite computer program. Recurrence relations are equations which define one or more sequences recursively.
This allows right folds to operate on infinite lists. By contrast, foldl will immediately call itself with new parameters until it reaches the end of the list. This tail recursion can be efficiently compiled as a loop, but can't deal with infinite lists at all — it will recurse forever in an infinite 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:
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.
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.
When an infinite loop is created intentionally there is usually another control structure that allows termination of 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 ...
1 Infinite loops found in society?? 3 comments. 2 The example in BASIC. 2 comments. 3 What a joke! 1 comment. 4 Misnomer.