Thread: infinite loop

my friend is running an infinite loop just displaying a message and beeping on a new line and hes been doing it for an hour. hes running windows XP Pro with 512 RAM

if memory serves correctly this should crash you computer. at least it did on older windows. so is there a reason his computer hasnt crashed yet? yea and hes new with C++ and he wrote this so im sure its bad and sucky. and its been running the whole time cause the beeps keep going off.

so why isnt his computer crashed yet?

The reason its repeating the message infinite times is because an incorrect datatype was entered into cin. For example he is suppose to enter an int value, but instead enters the character 'v', cin fails and flips out. That doesn't mean the programmers bad or whatever, it could happen to you, and probably has.

I use the following code to check for cin fails:

Code:

//after calling cin, call InputCheck();

inline void ClearStream (std::istream& in)
{
  in.clear ();
  in.ignore (std::numeric_limits <std::streamsize>::max (), '\n');
}

inline bool InputCheck ()
{
  if (std::cin.fail()) {
    std::cerr << "Error: invalid input entry\n";
    ClearStream (std::cin);
  } else {
    return 1;
  }

  return 0;
}

Anyway, his computers probably not crashing because the console is limited to how much text it can display (as you would see if you tried scrolling up, its limited to like 2 pages length). If its only displaying say 1000 words, thats still only like.. 20000 bytes or something, 20-70kb approx. max for the text. Couldnt be more than 1mb. You could check by hitting ctrl+alt+del and seeing how much ram its using, probably around 1500 kb is my guess. Thats not very much, considering World of Warcraft runs up to 600 mb.

so what newer versions of windows have a text limit to prevent crashing? cause it defently crashed on windows 98 since i always made infinite loops on accident lol

I wouldn't think an infinite loop that just prints a message to the console should ever crash windows. (even windows 98).

More likely the infinite loops you wrote that did cause a crash, were using resources (allocating memory) ,you vioalted an array boundary, or something similar.

Originally Posted by Vamslay1415

I'm Ssjnameks friend i tried that code and it did not successfully crash my computer. Thanks Though

Is there a reason you WANT to crash your or anybody else's computers?

nah i just remeber i had done it before with some kind of infinite loop and well curiousity kills cats you know lol

bravo Krak for posting that snippet.
I wouldn't be surprised if some members just stopped posting all of a sudden.