Question

My first attempt of reverse for loop that does something n times was something like:

for ( unsigned int i = n-1; i >= 0; i-- ) {     ...      } 

This fails because in unsigned arithmetic i is guaranteed to be always greater or equal than zero, hence the loop condition will always be true. Fortunately, gcc compiler warned me about a ‘pointless comparison’ before I had to wonder why the loop was executing infinitely.

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I’m looking for an elegant way of resolving this issue keeping in mind that:

1. It should be a backwards for loop.
2. The loop index should be unsigned.
3. n is unsigned constant.
4. It should not be based on the ‘obscure’ ring arithmetics of unsigned integers.

Any ideas? Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

How about:

for (unsigned i = n ; i-- > 0 ; ) {   // do stuff with i }