Since loop { } could either mean "do nothing" or "loop infinitely", and one of these alternatives is clearly useless, it's pretty obvious to me what the construct does.

The doubts about infinite repetition of no-ops look artificially constructed to me, and make a fine topic for a meditation, as long as you don't actually propose to change the language specification.

To try to answer on a more technical level: an optimizer is allowed to unroll loops as long as no behavior changes, but if the optimizer unrolls infinitely many iterations for noops into one, it makes an error. And that's because not all operations that work on finite things work the same on infinite things, which is a well-known theme in mathematics. (For example proof by induction only works over finite numbers).

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

In reply to Re: Should loop {} really loop indefinitely? by moritz
in thread Should loop {} really loop indefinitely? by grondilu

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