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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.
Sometimes within the body of a loop there is a desire to skip the remainder of the loop body and continue with the next iteration of the loop. Some languages provide a statement such as continue (most languages), skip, [8] cycle (Fortran), or next (Perl and Ruby), which will do this. The effect is to prematurely terminate the innermost loop ...
A language that supports the statement construct typically has rules for one or more of the following aspects: Statement terminator – marks the end of a statement; Statement separator – demarcates the boundary between two statements; need needed for the last statement; Line continuation – escapes a newline to continue a statement on the ...
An example of a programming language construct which may or may not terminate is a loop, as they can be run repeatedly. Loops implemented using a counter variable as typically found in data processing algorithms will usually terminate, demonstrated by the pseudocode example below:
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 " loop, which continues to run until the control expression is true and then terminates.
Thus the loop will always result in x = 2 and will never break. This could be fixed by moving the x = 1 instruction outside the loop so that its initial value is set only once. In some languages, programmer confusion about mathematical symbols may lead to an unintentional infinite loop. For example, here is a snippet in C:
In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program.A continuation implements the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computational process at a given point in the process's execution; the created data structure can be accessed by the programming language, instead of being hidden in the ...
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 ...