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From: sampson@cod.NOSC.MIL (Charles H. Sampson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: bug me now / bug me later
Keywords: philosophical differences
Message-ID: <1946@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Date: 8 Jun 90 16:51:52 GMT
References: <811@sagpd1.UUCP>
Reply-To: sampson@cod.nosc.mil.UUCP (Charles H. Sampson)
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <811@sagpd1.UUCP> jharkins@sagpd1.UUCP (Jim Harkins) writes:
>
>Lets say you have the following (you ADA people, please bear with me):
>
>	#define SIZE	6
>	#define STEP	2
>
>Which is better:
>
>	a.	for(i = SIZE; i != 0; i -= STEP)
>or
>	b.	for(i = SIZE; i > 0; i -= STEP)
>
>Where this makes a difference is suppose SIZE is changed to 7.  Obviously
>'a' goes into an infinite loop, while 'b' stops.  In the real world SIZE and
>STEP could be variables that have been input by a user and manipulated a
>gazillion times before being used in the for loop.
>
     Neither is inherently better than the other; it depends on the problem.
If the problem requires that SIZE be a multiple of STEP, then a is preferable
because it reflects the problem requirement, but the requirement itself must
be validated at some point.  If there is no required relation between SIZE
and STEP, then b reflects that fact and is preferable.  (Of course, a is
wrong in the latter case, so b is strongly preferable.)

     All of this is MHO, naturally.

                               Charlie Sampson, CSC

P. S.  Anything written down here can be ignored.  The poster would not ac-
cept my followup because I had included more than I had written.  Strange,
I thought I had cut down the original article to the minimum needed to es-
tablish the context, then gave a compact response.  Apparently that's not
good enough.  The only solution in such a case seems to be to pad your
followup enough to get past that limitation.  Seems to me that the limita-
tion is self-defeating.  This is the end of my first try at padding.