Question

I wrote the following code, which answers differently when I have printing statement and without it.

class test
{
    public static void main(String args[])
    {
      int i = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
      int j = Integer.MAX_VALUE-100;
      int count = 0;
      for(; j<=i; j++){
        count++;
        //System.out.println(j); // If we remove comment, answer is different
      }
     System.out.println(count + ", " + j + ", " + (j<=i));        
    }
}

The answer without print statement is :

101, -2147483648, true

and with print statement is :

15588, -2147468161, true

In both the cases, the final condition should return false, but it returns true. Can anybody explain this.

Answer 1

j <= Integer.MAX_VALUE is always true by definition. Your loop never ends, in both cases.

If you change this to j < i, the loop will terminate and the same answer will be returned regardless of the print statement.

EDIT

When testing the code with Netbeans / Oracle JDK 7u9, the loop never ends as expected. However some report that they see the same behaviour as described in the question. @auselen points to this similar post which refers to a bug.