Thread: While loop question.

Hi,

Okay, the following loop has been taken from a book I am studying from:

Code:

while(true) {
Month m;
if(!(is >> m)) break;
y.month[m.month] = m;
}

My first question is regarding the condition while(true), does this basically mean that the loop qill continue until something explicitly states to exit the loop? In this case, the break statement? Or this could be triggered by returning something other than 1? Is that right?

Also, in this example, the >> operator has been overloaded to read from an istream, in this case a txt file. If there is nothing read then this will break the loop, however the statement below that does not appear to do anything with the input stream? There is nothing explicit within that loop to say read from a stream, yet I think thats what it implies? Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Darren.

Originally Posted by Elysia

While forever:
Create a month m.
Extract a month from the stream and store it in m. If this fails, break the loop.
Set y.month[m.month] to m.
Loop.

Clearer?

A little. I can see that if there is no stream, then the loop will break. However I can't see where it says to extract a month from the stream. Does that part basically mean, get the data from the stream and if it fails, break?

Thanks.

Originally Posted by MK27

Yes, exactly.



Nope. The only way out of such a loop is break, return, or exit (or a call to function which calls exit).

Okay thats clear now. It's because the while loop is not a function and obviously nothing is expected to be returned.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by MK27

Presumably [] is overloaded here too, otherwise this line is hard to understand:

Code:

y.month[m.month] = m;

I haven't seen the declarations for these or their class definitions so it would be hard to say precisely how that works out.

No [] isn't overloaded. It is quite hard to explain, basically its classes and objects that contain a few vectors.

Originally Posted by Elysia

That is exactly what it does. Take this code:

Code:

if(!(is >> m)) break;

Now let's break it into separate lines:

Code:

istream& file = is >> m; // The >> operator returns the stream itself, is.
if (!file) break; // If we were unable to extract the data from the file into m, the file will be marked as "bad".

This is also essentially the same as

Code:

is >> m;
if (!is) break;

The is >> m extracts the month from the file, if there is one. We know that because m is a month.

Thanks, It's all a little clearer now!