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From: Patrick Logan <plogan@user2.teleport.com>
Subject: Re: Software landmines (loops)
Date: 1998/09/03
Message-ID: <BOxH1.7156$f01.5180500@news.teleport.com>#1/1
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Organization: Teleport - Portland's Public Access (503) 220-1016
NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 07:35:13 PDT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-09-03T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In comp.object Matthew Heaney <matthew_heaney@acm.org> wrote:
: Patrick Logan <plogan@user2.teleport.com> writes:

: > If you memoize the result of the first test, then the second test is
: > about as fast as can be...
: > 
: >   boolean test;
: >   ...
: >   do {
: >     ...
: >     test = N;
: >     if (test)
: >       ...
: >   } while (test);
: > 
: > This does not add a new state to a decision table. It provides a
: > mnemonic for the test condition. The redundant test is minimal
: > compared to the other work in the loop, not to mention the rest of the
: > application. If you are writing small methods anyway, then it is very
: > clear what is occurring.

: The thing I dislike about this code fragment is that it creates an extra
: variable.  

: I still prefer to do this:

:    for (;;) {
:      Get (N);

:      if (N == 0) break;

:      <process N>
:    }

: No extra variable is required.

I am not going to argue *strongly* for or against either style. Just
keep the loop to ten lines, as in these examples, and I can see easily
what it does. If you instead have a longer loop with more
conditionals, etc. then I need to spend more effort examining the loop
to see if there is more than one place the "infinite" loop actually
terminates.

So I can sum up my position is that size *does* matter!

-- 
Patrick Logan    (H) mailto:plogan@teleport.com 
                 (W) mailto:patrickl@gemstone.com 
                 http://www.gemstone.com