Question

I am looking to do something somewhat evil. I want to redefine for loops to modify the conditional. Is there any way to do this?

From the GCC documentation, redefining keywords is supported: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Macros.html

What I’m trying to do is make a “probabilistic” wrapper for C++, to see if I can make anything interesting with it.

#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>

#define P 0.85

#define RANDOM_FLOAT  ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX)

#define RANDOM_CHANCE (RANDOM_FLOAT < P)

#define if(a) if((a) && RANDOM_CHANCE)

#define while(a) while((a) && RANDOM_CHANCE)


// No more for loops or do-while loops
#define do
#define goto

// Doesn't work :(
//#define for(a) for(a) if(!RANDOM_CHANCE) { break; } 


int main() {
    srand(time(NULL));

    //Should output a random list of Y's and N's
    for(int i=0; i < 100; ++i) {
        if(i < 100) {
            std::cout << "Y";
        } else {
            std::cout << "N";
        }
    }

    std::cout << std::endl;

    // Will loop for a while then terminate
    int j = 0;
    while(j < 100) {
        ++j;
        std::cout << j << "\n";
    }

   std::cout << std::endl;

   return 0;
}

A perhaps more legitimate use would be to count the number of loop iterations in a running program, for example by mapping

for(int i=0; i < 10; ++i)

to

for(int i=0; i < 10; ++i, ++global_counter)

Is it possible to accomplish what I am trying to do?

---

EDIT: Thanks for the responses – I really appreciate it!

One of the things I can do with this is simulate a fair coin (effectively force P to be 0.5), by noting that if you have a biased coin, Pr(HT) == Pr(TH). I didn’t discover this trick, but it’s useful. So that means that you can approximate any probability distribution for P.

bool coin() {
  bool c1 = false;
  bool c2 = false;

  if(true) {
    c1 = true;
  }
  if(true) {
    c2 = true;
  }

  //If they have different faces.
  bool valid = (c1 && !c2) || (!c1 && c2);
  bool result = c1;

  if(valid) { return result; }

  return coin();
}

Answer 1

Have you tried adding an else to your for loop? That should make it work.

#define for(a) for(a) if(!RANDOM_CHANCE) { break; } else

for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
{
    // do something
}

/* should roughly compile to:
for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) if(!RANDOM_CHANCE) { break; } else
{
    // do something
}

or (differing only in whitespace):

for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
    if(!RANDOM_CHANCE)
    {
        break;
    }
    else
    {
        // do something
    }
*/