Question

A question mostly for fun/curiosity: how to write a for loop in C++ that would iterate over two values of a bool (i.e. true and false), using only operations with bool (i.e. without conversions to other types)?

The background is that I wanted to check how many solutions exists for an equation like (A && B) || (!B && !C && !D) == true, and started to write something like for (bool A=false; ??? ; ++A) for (bool B=false; ...) etc but immediately got stuck by ??? – i.e. what would be the condition to continue the loop? Of course I rewrote it to use int, and I also know that a do ... while loop will work, but I got curious if it’s ever possible to write such a for loop? And since SO does not seem to have an answer, I decided to ask 🙂

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Update: note that an “obvious” variant for(bool A=false; !A; A=true) suggested in at least two now-removed answers will only run one iteration, because for the second one the condition !A becomes false and the loop ends.

After some pondering, I believe it’s impossible to do it in C++03 without a second variable or a pointer based construct like suggested by Dietmar Kühl. The condition should be tested three times in a desired execution, so two values of a bool are simply not enough. And the do-while loop works because the first iteration is executed unconditionally, the condition is only checked twice and so a bool value can be used to select between continuing and exiting.

Answer 1

In C++11: for (bool b : { false, true }) { /* ... */ }

Here’s a C++03 version:

for (bool a = true, b = false; b != a; a = a && b, b = !b) { /*...*/ }

(Use either a or b.)